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 5: Reverse Engineering an iOS Application (Developed Using Swift)

In the last chapter, we discussed how iOS applications, developed using the Objective C programming language, can be reverse engineered and disassembled to extract useful information from the binary.

Swift is now (at the time of writing – December 2021) the official language for iOS application development. The majority of the modern iOS applications are developed using Swift, as it provides some great benefits, such as better code readability. Swift generates a compiler error as you write code so that issues can be fixed right away, and it has better memory management, less code (in comparison with Objective C), support for dynamic libraries, and so on.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

  • Understanding the difference between Objective C and Swift applications
  • Reverse engineering a Swift application

Let's dive in!