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

Assessing implementation vulnerabilities


With all the vulnerabilities that we are able to find with respect to Android apps, it is important to understand what could potentially happen if attackers elevate privilege on the device from the app. This section focuses on vulnerabilities on the device itself rather than on an app.

Implementation vulnerabilities are of two types:

  • Local: Local vulnerabilities include platform-based and default apps that are installed

  • Remote: These are remote vulnerabilities within the platform that might allow remote access of the device

Let's take an example of packages that are running under the UID 1000. The following screenshot shows how many apps are running under the same UID. These shared IDs can be taken advantage of by malicious apps in order to control the device, even if it is not rooted. The following command is used to show how many apps are running under the same UID:

run app.package.list –u 1000

One more example is system accounts being stored in plaintext...