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

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Software reverse engineering, in simple terms, is the art of taking apart an application or software to understand its internal workings. The way a piece of software/code functions depends upon several factors such as the programming language, the CPU architecture it is built for, and programming practices. The process of reverse engineering as well as analyzing the reverse engineered software, depends on the type of architecture it was developed for, the type of programming language, and so on.

For mobile application reverse engineering, the initial phase requires an understanding of an application package structure, how it is developed, the programming language, binary format, the application package type, and so on. With this knowledge, we start the process of reverse engineering; in the case of an Android app, we use JADX because we know that Java code can be extracted from dex files. However, for an iOS app, we disassemble the binary using a disassembler...