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

The Mach-O binary file format


Similar to the file formats used in the OS X operating system, iOS apps are also compiled to native code using the Mach-O file format. A binary can support multiple architectures, and multiple Mach-O files can be archived into the same binary that resides on the device; these are known as universal or fat binaries. In addition, apps downloaded from App Store are encrypted using FairPlay DRM (short for Digital Rights Management) and decrypted later during runtime by the loader on the device.

The Mach-O file format consists of three main regions, as shown in the following diagram:

Note

More detailed information about the Mach-O binary file format can be found here:

(https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/MachORuntime/Reference/reference.html).

Let's understand the three different sections of the Mach-O file format, which can be very beneficial during the reverse-engineering process:

  • Header: In simple terms, the Header region...