Mobile applications are an important element to any company as they can play a very crucial role for interacting and attracting new clients. Clients trust these applications with their sensitive and personal information. Thus mobile application security is a concern for companies, as no business would want that confidential information of clients going to the hackers or their competition. Businesses are accepting the importance of mobile application pentesting and what role it can play in securing the mobile applications. Without application pentesting the penalties could be drastic and companies should make it part of the mobile application development process. To save the brand reputation companies have two options, first to hire pentesting services for securing the applications or second to train their development team with an android and iOS pentesting course.
Our courses and services help organizations to value their clients and make sure they are at forefront of cyber security. Our pentesting services ensure that while your enterprise applications are gaining popularity, we secure the entire data handled by your applications. With the help of pentesting course your team will be able to do application pentesting and identify all possible security issues before the hackers do, hence making your applications bullet-proof. Mobile application pentesting, is one of our core expertise, our experts have done years of research and have delivered training courses educating enterprises, governments and cyber security professionals all over the world.
Our mobile application pentesting course & service methodology is divided into following 4 phases:
- Application Pentesting Plan- Android & iOS pentesting
- Pentesting Implementation
- Post Implementation
- Reevaluation
Application Pentesting Plan
The first phase of the mobile application pentesting course and services is to gather information of target like in-scope application binaries (.ipa and/or .apk) for iOS and Android, IP addresses, URLs, API server details & details for code review.
During the mobile application pentesting services the client is made aware of engagement rules, deadlines, restrictions and scope of the pentesting services.
Application Pentesting Implementation
The second phase of mobile application pentesting course and services has various steps.
- Open-source intelligence gathering to identify publicly available sensitive information like email addresses, usernames, configuration information, forum posts, etc.
- Decompiling applications: During the application pentesting course we teach how to decompile the code and search for confidential information.
- Our pentesting services focus a lot on threat modeling for evaluating the types of threats and likelihood of these threats materializing. During the pentesting course you learn manual discovery of vulnerabilities and threats.
- Vulnerability analysis is an important phase of application pentesting implementation. This embraces the enumeration of targets to evaluate the attack surface. Pentesting course focuses on different techniques for doing both static and dynamic code analysis.
- Exploitation process involves exploiting all the potential vulnerabilities identified during the assessment and attempting to exploit them as a hacker. The android & iOS pentesting course teaches the process of successful exploitation of the vulnerability and how to handle false positives identified during the application pentesting.
- Post Exploitation process is performed for both android and iOS pentesting and it involves successful exploitation of vulnerabilities to do analysis of infrastructure, confidential data identification & data exfiltration. With the help of android & iOS pentesting course you learn how to prioritize all the collected information and ranking of identified vulnerabilities.
Post Implementation
After completing the pentesting service, the phase of formally documenting the findings comes. The pentest report is very detailed and includes an executive risk report and a technical report. The focus of our pentesting service is to deliver executive report for management, which includes overview of pentesting service activities, scope, threats discovered & overall risk score. The technical report delivered after the pentesting service includes vulnerabilities exploited and the recommended mitigation.
Reevaluation
In this phase all assessments go through reevaluation after the confirmation of mitigation from the client team. The reevaluation phase is a important part of pentesting services as it includes the generation of revision documentation and performing any retesting to test the security measures implemented after the initial pentesting.
Tools and process used during android and iOS pentesting
For android & iOS pentesting we teach how to set up an environment during the pentesting training. Using this environment you can play with apps or commercially available applications. It doesn’t really matter which device you choose. An iPad is probably the most multipurpose device as it can run iPhone and iPad apps. For in depth android & iOS pentesting, you will need a rooted android and jailbroken iOS device. Thus, you can have root access to the device and test the related processes also. Jailbreaking or rooting the device is not that difficult and you can easily learn during the pentesting course.
For application pentesting you don’t need a Mac as we can use a Linux machine or OS X virtual machine. You can also use a Mac device; especially since it is easier to review code in a Mac device. To connect your machine to your iPad you need to SSH on jailbroken device. Following are some of tools covered during the iOS pentesting course.
OpenSSH
The first step during iOS pentesting course is to use OpenSSH. You need to install OpenSSH on the device from Cydia. This will allow you to login to the jailbroken device as root. With the IP address of the iPad you will be able to do a SSH to it. The default password for the root account on iOS is alpine but you will be able change it, as well as the password for the user mobile, to something else in order to protect it from malware attacks.
Install Xcode and Command Line Tools
Xcode includes everything we need to create amazing apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. The Swift programming language has great features that make your code even easier to read and write. According to pentesting services experts, Xcode is Apple’s IDE and includes the latest iOS SDK and iOS Simulator. It’s available for free on the Mac App Store. Once Xcode is installed be sure to install the Command Line Tools. You can easily learn this during the iOS pentesting course.
class-dump-z
class-dump-z is used to dump class information from an application for iOS pentesting. To download and install class-dump-z go to its official page and follow the instructions. Go inside the folder iphone_armv6 and copy the class-dump-z executable into /usr/bin directory. This will make sure you can run class-dump-z from your device. With class-dump-z you can analyze apps for class information. For example, you can dump the class information for the Apple Messenger app. You can learn more about it in iOS pentesting course.
Clutch & Rasticrac
We can crack any app on an iOS device with the help of this software as per iOS pentesting services experts. All the applications downloaded from App Store are stored in /var/mobile/Applications/ and are stored in encrypted form. You will need to decrypt these apps first to analyze them. You can decrypt the apps with the help of Clutch or Rasticrac.
IAP Cracker
IAP cracker is a tool for iOS devices and it bypasses the payment page, letting users get full application functionality to experience the real game or application usage. IAP cracker allows to get all paid in-app purchases free of cost. As per iOS pentesting course professor, IAP cracker enables to use all in-app purchases and get free coins for all your games that are been played in iOS device.
Runtime Analysis with GDB
Almost all the native iOS applications are written in Objective-C. It is a runtime-oriented language, which means that whenever it is possible, it defers decisions from compile and link time to the time when the code in the application is actually being executed. With GNU debugging (GDB) you can hook into a running process and execute code or modify an app. While running GDB you need to make sure that the process is running to monitor the flow and hook into application code. You can learn more about GDB in in iOS pentesting course.
Cycript
Cycript allows to do Swizzling as per iOS pentesting services experts. Cycript allows developers to explore and modify running applications on either iOS or Mac OS X using a hybrid of Objective-C++ and JavaScript syntax through an interactive console that features syntax highlighting and tab completion. It can also hook into a running process and help you to modify a lot of the things in the application during runtime. If you SSH into an iOS device with cycript installed, you can run it directly from the device. This immediately gives access to a REPL environment set up. It’s at this point that you can also decide what process to inject your modifications into. During the iOS pentesting services, it allows to hook into a running process and play with the classes, controllers, libraries, variables and methods.
Snoop-it
Snoop-it is a tool to assist dynamic analysis and blackbox iOS pentesting by retrofitting existing apps with debugging and runtime tracing capabilities. Snoop-it allows on-the-fly manipulations of arbitrary iOS Apps with an easy-to-use graphical user interface. Thus, bypassing client-side restrictions or unlocking additional features and premium content of Apps is going to be a child’s play.
With research centers in Mexico, USA and India, the International Institute of Cyber Security delivers application pentesting courses and services. Our pentesting services and courses provide enterprises with guidance to effectively remediate any new threat and implementation of mobile security architecture.
We have a global experience in the private and government sector and with our pentesting courses business professionals can develop a complete view of enterprise security profile and have a clear vision of how to face enterprise technology risks. We have a partner program that recognizes the effort and investment of strategic allies, offering online pentesting courses, classroom courses, services and tools to achieve sustainable and mutually beneficial business. Our partners / partners program is available in Australia, UK, Dubai, Sri-Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Nigeria, Kenya & South Africa.