Book Image

Mobile Application Penetration Testing

By : Vijay Kumar Velu
Book Image

Mobile Application Penetration Testing

By: Vijay Kumar Velu

Overview of this book

Mobile security has come a long way over the last few years. It has transitioned from "should it be done?" to "it must be done!"Alongside the growing number of devises and applications, there is also a growth in the volume of Personally identifiable information (PII), Financial Data, and much more. This data needs to be secured. This is why Pen-testing is so important to modern application developers. You need to know how to secure user data, and find vulnerabilities and loopholes in your application that might lead to security breaches. This book gives you the necessary skills to security test your mobile applications as a beginner, developer, or security practitioner. You'll start by discovering the internal components of an Android and an iOS application. Moving ahead, you'll understand the inter-process working of these applications. Then you'll set up a test environment for this application using various tools to identify the loopholes and vulnerabilities in the structure of the applications. Finally, after collecting all information about these security loop holes, we'll start securing our applications from these threats.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mobile Application Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

iOS application programming languages


A majority of the apps developed for iOS are native apps; these are developed in Objective-C and, since 2015, Swift. Apple has mandated the use of Swift for developing apps. This would be easy for those who have some background in object-oriented programming languages.

Objective-C

Objective-C is a strict superset of and augmentation to C; it is an object-oriented language that adds Smalltalk-style (an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language) messaging to the C programming language and was created by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s. This means that the Objective-C compiler can also compile C programs. The following diagram provides the sample Objective-C runtime and its components:

In Objective-C, one does not call the object one sends a message to. This language is mainly used on the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems and their APIs. The apps are compiled to native code and linked against the iOS SDK and Cocoa Touch...