Utilizing reverse engineering skills
As a mobile application penetration tester, malware researcher, exploit writer, and so on, you will often be required to reverse engineer different types of applications. As discussed in the previous chapters of this book, mobile application reverse engineering can be helpful in a lot of ways:
- Bypassing security controls such as certificate pinning and root/jailbreak detection
- Analyzing the application flow and bypassing any runtime security control, such as input encryption
- Analyzing mobile malware applications
- Performing security assessment of an application
- Finding security issues in code or an application package
- Modifying the behavior of an application and repacking it
In more than 500+ black-box mobile application penetration tests that I have performed so far, reverse engineering is the first step. It gives a great insight into how an application is created, some basic details, and low-hanging vulnerabilities...