Sep 11, 2020Member-onlyTales of API Woes From a Security Professional Part 2Looking at mobile app API examples and the shortcomings of their security posture. — This is part 2 of our views on APIs. If you haven’t read part 1 then why are you still here? Go take a look :) Tales of API Woes From a Security Professional Part 1 APIs need securing properly, not just via obscurity.medium.com Leaking all app data APIs generally have access to loads of user data; they are the middleman to the transactions between the client interface and the back-end databases…Cybersecurity9 min readCybersecurity9 min read
Sep 11, 2020Tales of API Woes From a Security Professional Part 1APIs need securing properly, not just via obscurity. — Application programming interfaces, or APIs, are a large part of today’s world; they are a set of software functions that define the way that multiple applications communicate with each other. Whenever you use an Internet aware software application whether this is a software package, web app, or mobile app it…Cybersecurity4 min readCybersecurity4 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Jul 3, 2020Exploiting App PIN Mechanisms on AndroidLocating and exploiting custom application protection methods. — Mobile applications are part of our daily lives, from banking, messaging, health, financial to social networking; but what do most of this type of app have in common? They all hold some sort of private user data. Whether that data is account numbers, private messages, credit card statements, or the…Cybersecurity6 min readCybersecurity6 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Jun 24, 2020Bypassing SSL Pinning on AndroidCircumventing certificate pinning on Android with smali patches. — Almost all mobile applications communicate with a backend server, whether this is transmitting app data, backups, analytics; there is some sort of back and forth of data over wireless communication channels in mobile devices. Most developers know that they need to use HTTPS, it is 2020 after all, but in…Cybersecurity8 min readCybersecurity8 min read
Jun 16, 2020Defeating Android Root Detection with Smali PatchingBinary patching Android applications to bypass security mechanisms. — Root detection in Android apps has always been a cat and mouse game. Developers come up with new checks, or a new library comes out; the attackers then bypass these checks or hide root from the filesystem. …Android10 min readAndroid10 min read
Jun 9, 2020Smali: Assembler for Android’s VMAssembly language for the dex format, used by Android’s Dalvik virtual machine. — When testing Android mobile apps, quite often you can find yourself in a situation where you face a security mechanism that you wish to bypass, either because the app won’t run (e.g root detection) or there is something else you want to investigate more (e.g SSL pinning). Usually a tester…Android5 min readAndroid5 min read
Jun 2, 2020Exploring Native Functions with Frida on Android — part 4Modifying the input arguments and return values of native functions. — We’ve observed how modules from both app execution and the app lifecycle are loaded within the app, but why would this need to be done on a pentest? What can we actually do with all the scripts? The aim of this final post is to solve the third consideration; to…Android Development5 min readAndroid Development5 min read
May 27, 2020Exploring Native Functions with Frida on Android — part 3Using Frida to explore libraries during runtime — In part 2 we moved into a dynamic approach at investigating native libraries using frida-trace and frida CLI. We leveraged the power of the API to construct our own scripts to get useful information from these native functions; however we were left with two considerations. The script can only enumerate…Android5 min readAndroid5 min read
May 21, 2020Exploring Native Functions with Frida on Android — part 2Dynamic exploration using frida-trace and CLI — Dynamic Inspection Having covered what can be done with a static approach¹ on native libraries as an information gathering technique, we can move into a more dynamic approach, running the app and leveraging runtime tools. Ideally, we would like to achieve the following: Understand which native functions are being used and ideally…Mobile Security5 min readMobile Security5 min read
May 18, 2020Exploring Native Functions with Frida on Android — part 1Native library static inspection and the JNI — Introduction Mobile security testing of Android applications involves code review in order to understand how the app logic and flow works, as well as identifying any potential security vulnerabilities. If the app was developed in Java, decompiling the app means reversing the compilation process in order to extract the Java source-code…Android5 min readAndroid5 min read
