Book Image

Mobile App Reverse Engineering

By : Abhinav Mishra
5 (1)
Book Image

Mobile App Reverse Engineering

5 (1)
By: Abhinav Mishra

Overview of this book

Mobile App Reverse Engineering is a practical guide focused on helping cybersecurity professionals scale up their mobile security skills. With the IT world’s evolution in mobile operating systems, cybercriminals are increasingly focusing their efforts on mobile devices. This book enables you to keep up by discovering security issues through reverse engineering of mobile apps. This book starts with the basics of reverse engineering and teaches you how to set up an isolated virtual machine environment to perform reverse engineering. You’ll then learn about modern tools such as Ghidra and Radare2 to perform reverse engineering on mobile apps as well as understand how Android and iOS apps are developed. Next, you’ll explore different ways to reverse engineer some sample mobile apps developed for this book. As you advance, you’ll learn how reverse engineering can help in penetration testing of Android and iOS apps with the help of case studies. The concluding chapters will show you how to automate the process of reverse engineering and analyzing binaries to find low-hanging security issues. By the end of this reverse engineering book, you’ll have developed the skills you need to be able to reverse engineer Android and iOS apps and streamline the reverse engineering process with confidence.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Basics of Mobile App Reverse Engineering, Common Tools and Techniques, and Setting up the Environment
4
Section 2: Mobile Application Reverse Engineering Methodology and Approach
8
Section 3: Automating Some Parts of the Reverse Engineering Process

Automated static analysis of mobile applications

The first step during a black box penetration test is to gather as much information as possible about the target. In the case of a mobile application penetration test (black box), a static analysis of the application package (Android Application Package (APK) or iOS application archive (IPA)) is done to get a basic idea about the application, as well as to analyze it for some low-hanging vulnerabilities and missing security controls. Let's have a look at things that a static analysis tool can check on an application:

  • Extract details about the application from the application's manifest (for Android) or PLIST (for iOS) files.
  • Analyze the binary for protections such as Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), code signing, and Position Independent Executable (PIE).

    Important Note

    ARC is used for automatic memory management in iOS apps. This is done by handling the reference count of objects at the time of compilation...