Process
Valency Networks follows a technical and systematic approach to perform security testing of your mobile app. The process starts with decompiling and goes through detailed analysis for data at rest and data in transit vulnerabilities.
Following steps are performed.
The results are compiled and converted into a technical report.
Below are few quick questions which come to mind, pertaining to the mobile app's security and testing process.
A - By capturing the traffic originating from the mobile app, towards the backend cloud or web hosted services. We look for possible injections into that traffic at various parameters. SQL Injection, cookie injection are few examples of it.
A - Each application stores data on the mobile device in some form or other. The locations can also be different, ranging from the device memory to the external storage. We detect this and see if/how that data can result into potential critical information leakage. Encryption is one of the things that we test, but there are many complex security scenarios (especially in android), that we test the vulnerabilities for.
A - Android apps are fragile if care is not taken properly. The same goes with iOS because its taken for granted to be secure by nature. Our years of experience in android and iOS operating system bases and the API's helps us device the platform specific checks which range into hundreds of vulnerability possibilities each. All operating systems give out logs, which we capture too, to figure out data leakage possibilities.
A - Its not only about default vulnerabilities , or typical security problems as per OWASP Top 10. We go way beyond that, by understanding business logic, map the application in various business scenarios, and create customized vectors for testing. This method helps us go deep into the security of overall apps functionality, besides the common ones, and thus helps our customer gain accurate results which they need to fix.
A - An important steps in mobile app pentesting (VAPT) is to decompile the app. This helps us get under the skin of the app to expose the code. We deep dive into the code modules to find whether or not the coding is done to achieve the security, especially against data privacy thefts. This makes us a unique and best mobile app vapt company, providing VAPT services to customers from all industry sectors.
A - For android apps, the manifest exhibits some security issues, which there are multiple binary files under iOS which does the same. We use these details to map into mobile app's security threat modelling and use that information for further penetration testing.
While android and iOS app pentesting is a very detailed process and results into an elaborate checklist, below details can provide a glimpse of the all the tasks at a high level. All mobile app security testing companies who are best vendors for this task, follow OWASP Top 10 Mobile model and its summarized below. There are multiple mobile app security tools involved in this process, although we take pride in performing the testing manually to achieve best results.
Mobile app security testing is of four stages:
Intelligence gathering is the most important stage in a penetration test. The ability to discover hidden cues that might shed light on the existence of a vulnerability might be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful pentest.The discovery process involves:
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) -The pentester searches the Internet for information about the application. This might be found on search engines and social networking sites, leaked source code through source code repositories, developer forums, or even on the dark web.
Understanding the Platform -It is important for the penetration tester to understand the mobile application platform, even from an external point of view, to aid in developing a threat model for the application. The pentester takes into account the company behind the app, their business case, and related stakeholders. The internal structures and processes are also taken to account.
Client-Side vs Server-Side Scenarios - The penetration tester needs to be able to understand the type of application (native, hybrid, or web) and to work on the test cases. The application's network interfaces, user data, communication with other resources, session management, jailbreaking/rooting behavior are all taken into account here. Security considerations are also made; for example, does the app interact with firewalls? Databases or any servers? How secure is this?
Collected information may include:
The process of assessing mobile applications is unique because it requires the penetration tester to check the applications before and after installation. The different assessment techniques that are encountered within the MAPTM include:
Local File Analysis -The pentester checks the local files written on the file system by the application to ensure that there are no violations.
Archive Analysis - The penetration tester extracts the application installation packages for the Android and iOS platforms. A review is then done to ensure that there are no modifications done to the configurations of the compiled binary.
Reverse Engineering - This involves converting the compiled applications into human-readable source code. The penetration tester reviews the readable code in order to understand the internal application functionality and search for vulnerabilities. Android application source code may be modified once reversed and recompiled. The following tools can be used while conducting reverse engineering:
Static Analysis - During static analysis, the penetration tester does not execute the application. The analysis is done on the provided files or decompiled source code.
Dynamic Analysis - The pentester reviews the mobile application as it runs on the device. Reviews done include forensic analysis of the file system, assessment of the network traffic between the application and server and an assessment of the application's inter-process communication (IPC). There are a couple of tools that are available to the pentester for automated and manual source code analysis. These include:
Reverse Engineering - This involves converting the compiled applications into human-readable source code. The penetration tester reviews the readable code in order to understand the internal application functionality and search for vulnerabilities. Android application source code may be modified once reversed and recompiled. The following tools can be used while conducting reverse engineering:
Inter-Process Communication Endpoint Analysis: The pentester reviews the different mobile application IPC endpoints. Assessment is performed on:
Information obtained from the assessment may be used to create a threat model. For example, we can consider the following:
The pentester acts upon the information discovered from the information-gathering process to attack the mobile application. Thoroughly performed intelligence gathering guarantees a high chance of successful exploitation hence a successful project.
The pentester attempts to exploit the vulnerability in order to gain sensitive information or perform malicious activities, then finally performs privilege escalation to elevate to the most privileged user (root) so as to not face any restrictions on any activities being performed.
The pentester then persists within the compromised device.
This simply means that he/she executes modules that allow for backdooring the device with the motive of showing the ability to perform future access.
A good report communicates to management in simple language, clearly indicating the discovered vulnerabilities, consequences to the business and possible remediation or recommendations.
The vulnerabilities must be risk rated and proper technical communication done for the technical personnel, with a proof of concept included to support the findings uncovered.
Yes. OWASP has created separate guidelines and attack vectors for mobile applications. Since the mobile apps contain a static code analysis along with the dynamic one, it is imperative to cover these angles via a carefully created vulnerability assessment checklist. TOP10 Mobile security issues have been listed below:
We follow a systematic and yet agile approach to test mobile App security. This helps our customers gain extremely accurate and elaborate results. We follow OWASP Top 10 standard to find and report vulnerabilities. While we do use automated tools, we focus more on manual testing to mimic the real life hackers.
Yes. OWASP has created separate guidelines and attack vectors for mobile applications. Since the mobile apps contain a static code analysis along with the dynamic one, it is imperative to cover these angles via a carefully created vulnerability assessment checklist. TOP10 Mobile security issues have been listed below:
Yes. If the application is not hosted, the mobile application apk or ipa can be shared. Pentesting the mobile application using the apk or ipa file won't be a challenge.
Mobile app security testing is to be carried out before deployment of the application and every time a new functionality or feature is added. Other than that quarterly or half yearly VAPT/security testing need to be done on the mobile application to ensure the application is secure against the daily emerging new attacks and techniques.
Testing is an indispensable part of every software development process. Mobile application is no exception: the growing number of mobile devices gives rise to a massive operation system fragmentation, screen sizes, and more. That is why tremendous attempts are made by QA teams to ensure the user’s seamless experience across various mobile devices without functionality bugs and issues. By putting the mobile application through rigorous testing, the product team can enhance the app’s ratings, as well as customer satisfaction for valuable referrals for even more downloads.
The types of mobile applications:
Thera are mainly nine types of mobile app testing:
Some of the challenges are:
End-to-end mobile testing is a comprehensive technique of verifying software systems from start to finish to ensure the application flow is working as anticipated. It describes the system mandates and confirms all the integrated pieces work together as needed.
The automated testing method also allows you to run regression tests quickly. Repeated Execution: Repetitive and drawn-out tasks lend themselves well to automated testing. Performance Testing: When you're testing the speed and performance of a mobile app against thousands of concurrent users, automation is helpful.
We can follow the following steps to automate the process:
The main objective of a simulator is To simulate the internal behaviour of the device, not mimic hardware
Some of the common bugs are:
iOS A/B testing is the process of running a controlled experiment comparing one or more variations of an iOS app against the original, with the goal of improving a specific metric, such as taps, engagement or in-app purchases. The experiment is delivered to a selected percentage of the application's install base.
Manual testing is suitable when the test cases are run once or twice. Therefore there is no frequent repetition of test cases. Automated testing is suitable when the test cases need to run repeatedly for a long duration of time.
Three main segments are:
There are various mobile app automation testing tools used by the top automation companies, some of them are :
Our Culture
Valency Networks is a very agile, friendly and fun loving atmosphere and yet we maintain a cutting edge technical vibrant work environment.