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

iOS app development

iOS apps are commonly developed using the Swift or Objective-C languages. Objective-C is a general-purpose programming language with object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime. Until 2014, Objective-C was the official language for iOS app development.

Apple launched Swift in 2014, a general-purpose, high-level programming language designed to develop apps for Apple's operating systems. Initially, it was a proprietary language, but version 2.2 was made open source under Apache License 2.0.

For iOS application development, Xcode is the official integrated development environment (IDE). Developers also have the option of choosing other IDEs, such as AppCode or Visual Studio Code from Microsoft, but these IDEs also need Xcode underneath to work properly. Xcode includes the required software development kits (SDKs), tools, compilers APIs, and so on. Xcode uses the swiftc compiler for Swift and the clang compiler for Objective-C code.

The following...