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

Code obfuscation in Android apps

Code obfuscation is a process of modifying the code to protect intellectual property and to make it difficult to reverse engineer. Code obfuscation only modifies the method instructions or metadata; it does not change the logic/flow or the output of the code operation.

Android malware is also known to utilize obfuscation techniques to hide its malicious behavior. However, obfuscation can also be defeated. A skilled reverse engineer would be able to defy the obfuscation techniques implemented and still find the interesting bits in the application code.

Developers may use the default obfuscation tool ProGuard, available in Android Studio, or also use a third-party obfuscation tool available in the market. Depending upon the type of obfuscation used, the de-obfuscation technique should be changed. ProGuard is an open source command-line tool that can be used to obfuscate Java code.

One of the ways to de-obfuscate the DEX bytecode is by identifying...