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

Extracting the Java source code

The first objective of reverse engineering is to get the original source code with maximum accuracy. As we have the application package downloaded on our Ubuntu virtual machine, let's use the JADX tool to get the Java code.

However, it might also be a good idea to simply unzip the APK and extract its contents to see what's inside:

Figure 3.5 – Extracted contents of the APK

In order to use the JADX tool, open the directory where you extracted the JADX .zip file (as explained in Chapter 2, Setting Up a Mobile App Reverse Engineering Environment Using Modern Tools). Once in the directory, right-click to select the Open in Terminal option. In the opened Terminal window, type the following command to run JADX:

# cd bin/
# ./jadx-gui

In the JADX window, open the APK file you just downloaded. Refer to Chapter 2, Setting Up a Mobile App Reverse Engineering Environment Using Modern Tools, to see how to do this...