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    Mobile App Reverse Engineering: Get started with discovering, analyzing, and exploring the internals of Android and iOS apps
    Mobile App Reverse Engineering: Get started with discovering, analyzing, and exploring the internals of Android and iOS apps
    Mobile App Reverse Engineering: Get started with discovering, analyzing, and exploring the internals of Android and iOS apps
    Ebook249 pages1 hour

    Mobile App Reverse Engineering: Get started with discovering, analyzing, and exploring the internals of Android and iOS apps

    By Abhinav Mishra

    ()

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPackt Publishing
    Release dateMay 27, 2022
    ISBN9781801074902
    Mobile App Reverse Engineering: Get started with discovering, analyzing, and exploring the internals of Android and iOS apps

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      Book preview

      Mobile App Reverse Engineering - Abhinav Mishra

      Cover.png

      BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

      Mobile App Reverse Engineering

      Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

      Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

      Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

      Group Product Manager: Vijin Boricha

      Associate Publishing Product Manager: Prachi Sawant

      Senior Editor: Athikho Sapuni Rishana

      Content Development Editor: Sayali Pingale

      Technical Editor: Nithik Cheruvakodan

      Copy Editor: Safis Editing

      Associate Project Manager: Neil Dmello

      Proofreader: Safis Editing

      Indexer: Pratik Shirodkar

      Production Designer: Prashant Ghare

      Marketing Co-ordinator: Hemangi Lotlikar

      First published: April 2022

      Production reference: 1200422

      Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

      Livery Place

      35 Livery Street

      Birmingham

      B3 2PB, UK.

      978-1-80107-339-4

      www.packt.com

      Dedicated to the late Rajendra Singh, a passionate teacher, accomplished author, and learner who inspired many, like me, to seek knowledge above everything else. To my wife, Kanika Singh, for being the support I have always needed. And to my mother and father, for being role models to me and for motivating me.

      Contributors

      About the author

      Abhinav Mishra is the founder and director of Enciphers, a cybersecurity consulting and training company. Abhinav has over a decade of extensive experience in finding and fixing security issues in web, mobile, and infrastructure applications. He has performed penetration tests on more than 500 mobile applications and has discovered thousands of critical vulnerabilities.

      Abhinav completed his engineering degree in 2011 and since then has been involved in penetration testing and securing applications and infrastructure. Prior to founding Enciphers, Abhinav worked with Fortune 500 and giant tech companies as part of their security teams. In his spare time, he is a traveler, adventure seeker, and drone hobbyist.

      I would like to thank Manoj Jain, a skilled Android developer with almost a decade of experience, and Mohammad Haroon, who is a passionate iOS developer with 12+ years of experience in developing Swift/Objective and C/C++/C apps. Both of them assisted in developing the SecureStorage app, used in the book. Their contribution to this book is highly appreciated.

      About the reviewer

      Anant Shrivastava is the founder of a research firm named Cyfinoid Research. His last job was as a technical director for NotSoSecure Global Services. He has been active in the Android security field since the early days of Android development (2011). He has been a trainer and speaker at various international conferences (Black Hat – USA, Asia, EU, Nullcon, c0c0n, and many more). Anant also leads the open source projects Android Tamer and Code Vigilant. He also maintains the archive portal named Hacking Archives of India. In his spare time, he likes to take part in open communities geared to spreading information security knowledge, including the null community, Garage4hackers, Hasgeek, and OWASP.

      I truly believe all of us in the technical world are standing on the shoulders of giants. The giants for me are the open communities, such as null, Garage4hackers, Hasgeek, and OWASP, where access to information is unrestricted and people are interested in helping one another. I am deeply indebted to all the communities and the people running these communities. I am also thankful to my whole family for providing all the support and tolerating my busy schedule and still standing by my side. I would also like to do a special shout-out to my son, Aarush, whose smile gives me a reason to keep going.

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      Section 1: Basics of Mobile App Reverse Engineering, Common Tools and Techniques, and Setting up the Environment

      Chapter 1: Basics of Reverse Engineering – Understanding the Structure of Mobile Apps

      Technical requirements

      Reverse engineering fundamentals

      Android application fundamentals

      iOS application fundamentals

      Summary

      Chapter 2: Setting Up a Mobile App Reverse Engineering Environment Using Modern Tools

      Technical requirements

      Tools for the reverse engineering of mobile applications

      apktool

      JADX – Dex-to-Java decompiler

      smali/baksmali

      strings

      Ghidra

      Radare

      Mobexler virtual machine

      Summary

      Section 2: Mobile Application Reverse Engineering Methodology and Approach

      Chapter 3: Reverse Engineering an Android Application

      Technical requirements

      Android application development

      The reverse engineering of Android applications

      Extracting the Java source code

      Converting DEX files to smali

      Reverse engineering and penetration testing

      Modifying and recompiling the application

      Code obfuscation in Android apps

      Summary

      Chapter 4: Reverse Engineering an iOS Application

      Technical requirements

      iOS app development

      Understanding the binary format

      Reverse engineering an iOS app

      Extracting strings from the binary

      Disassembling the application binary

      Manually reviewing the disassembled binary for security issues

      Using Mac-only tools for iOS app reverse engineering

      Summary

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

      Technical requirements

      Understanding the difference between Objective C and Swift applications

      The difference between Objective C and Swift from a reverse engineering perspective

      Reverse engineering a Swift application

      Installing the Radare2 framework

      Using the Radare2 framework to reverse engineer a Swift application

      Summary

      Section 3: Automating Some Parts of the Reverse Engineering Process

      Chapter 6: Open Source and Commercial Reverse Engineering Tools

      Technical requirements

      Tools for mobile application reverse engineering

      Open source mobile application reverse engineering tools

      Commercial mobile application reverse engineering tools

      Case study – reverse engineering during a penetration test

      Case study – reverse engineering during malware analysis

      Summary

      Chapter 7: Automating the Reverse Engineering Process

      Technical requirements

      Automated static analysis of mobile applications

      MobSF

      Performing a static scan on SecureStorage

      Case study one – automating reverse engineering tasks

      Case study two – automating test cases to find security issues

      Summary

      Chapter 8: Conclusion

      Excelling in Android application reverse engineering – the way forward

      Excelling in iOS application reverse engineering – the way forward

      Utilizing reverse engineering skills

      Exposing unreleased features in an application through reverse engineering

      Summary

      Other Books You May Enjoy

      Preface

      Mobile application reverse engineering is an important skill for penetration testers, malware analysts, and application security professionals in general. This book talks about how Android and iOS applications are developed, how to reverse engineer them, different case studies of security issues discovered through reverse engineering, and how to automate the reverse engineering and analysis part.

      The book helps in understanding the internals of modern Android and iOS apps and how you can reverse engineer application packages (APK and IPA). Here, you can start your journey of creating a reverse engineering mobile application.

      Who this book is for

      This book is for cybersecurity professionals, security analysts, mobile application security enthusiasts, and penetration testers interested in understanding the internals of iOS and Android apps through reverse engineering. Basic knowledge of reverse engineering as well as an understanding of mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android and how mobile applications work on them are required.

      What this book covers

      Chapter 1, Basics of Reverse Engineering – Understanding the Structure of Mobile Apps, talks about the reverse engineering fundamentals, common terminologies, and Android and iOS application fundamentals.

      Chapter 2, Setting Up a Mobile App Reverse Engineering Environment Using Modern Tools, gets you familiar with the tools used in the reverse engineering of mobile (Android

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