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

Android components


As we learned about Android components in Chapter 2, Snooping Around the Architecture, every Android app is built upon one or more components. These components are normally defined as public when the exported option is set to true and also when the manifest file specifies an intent filter for the particular component. Developers have the flexibility of setting components as private even without intent filters by changing the exported option to false for every component in the manifest file. Let's now see what different components are available on our target app, FourGoats.

Attacking activities

An activity is nothing but a user interface that has a graphical representation. Traditionally, an app will have one or more activities, for example, a social network app has an activity for the user to log in and another to reset the password.

In order to determine the list of activities, we can run the drozer module app.acitivity.info on the target app, or we can directly view the...