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

Chapter 2. Snooping Around the Architecture

Architecture is the art of carefully designing the structure of something.

In electronics engineering, mobile architecture is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a system or product. Applications are among the most crucial elements of any mobile platform. In this chapter, we will snoop around or take a deep dive into aspects of the Android and iOS architectures, which will help you harvest vulnerabilities. We will also cover the following:

Android:

  • Understanding Android components

  • How Android components communicate with each other, that is, inter-process communication (IPC)

  • Building our knowledge of the Dalvik virtual machine and Android runtime

  • How the Android security model works

  • The difference between the DEX and OAT file formats

iOS:

  • How to navigate through an iOS application's directory structure

  • The different programming languages in iOS – Objective C and Swift

  • How the iOS security model is designed

  • How to inspect a Mach-O...