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 4: Reverse Engineering an iOS Application

In comparison to Android apps, reverse engineering an iOS application is a bit more complicated. This is mainly due to the security controls that are implemented by iOS and the way Apple manages application installation and verification across all iOS devices. For example, to get the iOS App Store Package (IPA) from a device running on the application, you can't simply extract the IPA and install it on another iOS device. This is because all the applications that are installed from the Apple App Store are encrypted on the device. Here, you would be required to extract a decrypted IPA and then sign it again to be able to run it on another iOS device.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Learning more about how iOS apps are developed
  • Understanding the iOS executable format
  • Exploring more about iOS app reverse engineering tools and their usage
  • Reverse engineering the SecureStorage iOS application...