Oh, the era of endless
mobility. There’s an app for everything nowadays. There’s even a tooth-fairy
calculator application for iOS that evaluates the appropriate price for a
child’s tooth under a pillow according to a plethora of factors. Wow. Just Wow.
But how safe are we as users? Surely you, as
proud readers of the EHACKING blog are aware of the situation – it’s not as
peach perfect as one might imagine. Reality is a fair from fairies as things
get. Credentials can get stolen from a locked iPhone throughout series of
seemingly harmless manipulations. Apps can be broken through something as
innocent as a connection to public Wi-Fi. Do I even need to go on?
Luckily there are
still teams of professional testers in
DeviQA, a professional software QA testing company,
to save the day with white hats on.
5 steps of mobile White Hat hacking
White Hat hacking or,
in other words, penetration testing of mobile applications is usually done with
respect to the below mentioned five basic pillars of test sets. Here’s how you
do it like a pro.
1.
Identify
the policy. This way a strategy can be narrated into clear and precise action
points. All in all security policies are used to identify which users are
authorized to do what and updating them on a constant basis is rather pivotal.
2.
Pay
attention to the platform. iOS, for once has recently proven to have more bugs
in apps than Android mainly because poor third-party software integration. Thus
if your app is designed for iPhones or iPads, double check all the external
APIs. Do they leave you vulnerable?
3.
Speaking
of third-party software – does it leave your soft belly open to a virus or any
other malware? Perhaps it can overload the system with countless requests or
massive loads? Stress and load tests can help in dealing with this issue just
fine.
4.
Combine
UPD and TPC to ensure if they are of any good. These are mobile device ports
used to interact with wireless networks like Wi-Fi or 3-G. Are they leaving
your application vulnerable to incoming threats? What can be done via
reverse-engineering the connection to your app?
5.
Are your
pp endpoints tucked safely behind a firm shield? Perhaps earlier releases never
had the same level of protection and dedication to quality. Perhaps they can be
used for an attack on your server?
Conclusion
In the world we live
in today safe and stable operations of the mobile infrastructure are essential to both credibility of businesses, client trust and overall public security.
You don’t want to engage in a real life game of Watch Dogs, do you?