You can get information about an app by going through third-party libraries, search engines, or finding the leaked source code by developer forums, and social media etc. Having an understanding of the platform is a relevant aspect of app penetration testing. In terms of creating the threat model for an application, it gives you a better brief from an external point of view.

Identify the application details and map them to various aspects of threat profile created. Some parameters include (a) Key chains, brute-force attacks, parameter tampering (b) Malicious input, fuzzing (c) SQLite database password fields, configuration file encryption (d) Session IDs, time lockouts (e) Error and exception handling (f) Logs, access control to logs.

Key focus areas of client side attack simulation are (a) Interaction with platform (b) Local storage (c) use of encryption (d) binary & final analysis (e) insecure API calls and (f) files with adequate access controls.

Network layer attack simulation include communication channel attacks, capturing network traffic and assessing transport layer protection.

Back-ends such as web services and API provides the application its intended functionality. Our testing team simulates attack of web services & APIs consumed by the mobile application.

Mobile apps have a special way of analysis or assessment, and the testers should check an app pre as well as post-installation. It can be performed through static analysis without executing the app, on the decompiled or provided accompanying files and source code or dynamic analysis which takes place while an app is running on the device. You can also perform the Archive Analysis where app installation packages for the iOS and Android platform will be extracted as well as inspected for reviewing configuration files. Reverse engineering can also be attempted for converting compiled apps into human-readable source code.

We will provide reports that detail the risks identified in the mobile application. The report includes recommendations for remediation and risk rating.Re-tests are performed to validate the closure of vulnerabilities.