[infosecinstitute] iOS Application Security Part 32 – Automating tasks with iOS Reverse Engineering Toolkit (iRET)

While doing security audit of iOS apps, there are a lot of tasks that we have to repeat every time. This includes finding out the class information for the app, checking if the application stores any important data in plist files, analyzing the content in the database files etc. These tasks can be a little time consuming every time and so it doesn’t make quite a lot of sense to repeat them over and over again for every app. We have also looked at some tools like Snoop-it and iNalyzer that make our job easier by automating some of these tasks. In this article, we will talk about a new tool named iOS Reverse Engineering Toolkit (iRET) that has just been released to assist penetration testers in automating most of the tasks involved in a iOS penetration test. The project is developed and maintained by @S3Jensen.

[infosecinstitute] IOS Application Security Part 30 – Attacking URL schemes

In this article, we will look at how we can use a feature in iOS named url schemes to exploit an application. URL schemes are used by applications to communicate with each other. Every application can register for a particular url scheme. For e.g, the Damn Vulnerable iOS application registers for the url scheme dvia. This means that any url starting with dvia:// protocol will open up the dvia application. Depending on the parameters and the endpoint in this url, the dvia application can decide what to do it. Another example is the phone application in iOS. It registers for the url scheme tel and a url like tel://1-393-222-2222 will invoke the phone application and call a number. The problem arises when the url is not validated or the user is not prompted for confirmation in the application before making a particular decision.