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

Case study one – automating reverse engineering tasks

During a research project, we need to analyze how secure modern mobile applications are and what percentage of these applications do not follow some best security practices of binary protection, such as a stack canary and a PIE flag.

In order to complete such research on a wide range of IPAs, we would need to automate the process of binary analysis and reverse engineering. This is where using a tool such as MobSF can be very productive. Here is how we performed such checks on more than 500 applications:

  1. We stored all IPAs at one location.
  2. We then used the MobSF REST APIs to automate the static analysis of binaries one by one:
    • By uploading the file: api/v1/upload
    • By scanning the uploaded file: /api/v1/scan
  3. Once the analysis is done, a JSON format of the report could be fetched and analyzed to find the value of checks we are interested in:
    • By generating the JSON report: api/v1/report_json

We then...