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

Static code analysis


As part of reverse engineering, performing static code analysis is not a simple task as it requires fairly good understanding of the assembly language and the app language by itself. However, one can use some of the available commercial tools to perform this task.

Loading the app into Hopper provides excellent details about the code and the app itself, as shown in the following screen capture. Hopper provides the feature of pseudo code and control flow graph (CFG).

You can view the assembly level using CFG; as shown in the following figure, Hopper provides the option to export this into PDF:

OpenURL schemes

In this section, let's take up the challenge of Security Decisions via Untrusted Input (Chapter 1, The Mobile Application Security Landscape). This can be achieved by following these simple steps:

  1. Load the app executable into Hopper. Search for OpenURL in the labels.

  2. Select AppDelegate Application:openURL and click on the Pseudo Code, and you should be able to see the...