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

Changes in iOS 8 and 9


Apple introduced the concept of access control and authentication policies for applications in iOS 8 and higher for file and keychain data protection. This screen capture from the Apple security guide provides an overview of how file and keychain data protection are placed:

Network-level security

All data traversals over the network are protected using encryption technologies for VPN, applications, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Airdrop, and so on.

A majority of inbuilt applications, such as Mail and Safari, use Transport Layer Security by default (TLS version 1.0 to 1.2). Some important classes for a well-developed app include the CFNetwork class, which disallows SSLv3 connections. Also note the NSURLConnection and NSURLSessionCFURL APIs being used.

Apps that are compiled for iOS 9 automatically ensure that app transport security is enforced.

Application-level security

Apple's close watch on app security allows plenty of layered approaches to protecting apps, using code signing, isolation...