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

Case study – reverse engineering during malware analysis

Another field of work that requires more advanced reverse engineering skills is malware analysis. Malware researchers spend days and weeks looking at disassembled and decompiled binaries to deduce the application flow. Let's take another case study.

During the analysis of a malware mobile app, it was noticed that the application somehow modifies its behavior depending on factors such as country, language, and applications installed. For a device in the United States, with the English language, and that had financial/banking apps, the application would try to read messages and the transaction history. However, on a different device in a different country, and with dating apps installed, it would try to inject ads in the traffic of other apps. Such a change in behavior cannot be noticed if the application is only used on one device.

However, a good analysis of the disassembled application binary and its associated...