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

Device level


The majority of security implementation is needed at the device level. This is sub-categorized into two more levels:

  • Platform level: In this level, developers must consider all the platform-specific risks and know the countermeasures to protect the app

  • Application level: Protection at the app level is the primary purpose of developers in order to provide confidentiality, integrity and availability of information to the user.

The following screenshot provides details of the device-level protection along with the mapping with OWASP mobile top ten risks that we discussed in Chapter 1, The Mobile Application Security Landscape:

Platform (OS) level

At an operating system level, we can tighten mobile app security by doing the following actions.

Screenshots/snapshots

By default, iOS provides the option of taking a snapshot of the current state, when the app transitions its state from active to suspended. We learned from the previous chapter how a screen capture can expose potential sensitive...