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

Understanding application states


When getting ready to assess iOS apps, it is important to understand application states. There are various app states in iOS. Apple allows only one state at a time. These states changes according to user or system actions.

For example, suppose you press the Home key and a text message (SMS) comes in, the currently running app changes its state to the background.

The following are the different states in iOS:

  • Not running: The app will be in this state before it is started and after it is terminated or aborted.

  • Inactive: An app in the inactive state is still running in the foreground but will not receive any events or alerts. For example, if you are browsing a website in Safari and receive an SMS and switch over to the SMS app, Safari is in the inactive state until it is reopened.

  • Active: When an app icon is clicked, it goes into the active state and will run in the foreground and actively receive events.

  • Background: In this state, apps run in the background...