Stages Of Android Application Penetration Test

Nowadays, both private and public organizations are using mobile apps in brand new and compelling methods, from banking applications to healthcare platforms.

Taking care of security threats on these systems is a growing challenge, with new vulnerabilities being discovered every day. The variety of mobile phone customers has been rising considerably in the last couple of years as mobile applications are becoming an integral part of everyday life. For that reason, protecting the data utilized by mobile apps has become vital. At the business level, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies permit staff members to connect their smartphones to enterprise networks. This gives an opportunity for hackers to pass through the network, as a recent study showed a significant rise in the number of attacks using mobile device malware. So, it is important for security specialists to understand the security of both mobile devices and the applications running on them. Smartphone security has become an emerging area of the research study. It mainly concentrates on Mobile Device Monitoring (MDM), device-level security, storage space security, transportation layer security, and smartphone application security.

In general, a mobile application pen test has the following stages:

• Automated scanning: Automated scanning is the very first stage of any penetration test, where the target application is scanned using tools for finding known and easy-to-find vulnerabilities. The goal of this stage is to find low-hanging fruits that can be identified using automation/brute force methodologies without wasting a lot of time finding them manually. In general, automated mobile application scanners check for various common configuration mistakes and programming mistakes by looking for specific patterns in the mobile application package. Automated scanning can be of two types: static scanning and dynamic scanning.
• Manual verification of issue/findings of automated scanning: One of the major limitations of automated vulnerability scanning is that scan results can have false positives. At this stage of a mobile application penetration test, penetration testers manually verify the findings of automated scanners, determine the exploitability, and eliminate false positives.
• In depth manual penetration testing: For obvious reasons, an automated scanner misses a lot of logical issues. At this stage of the penetration test, the tester will manually dive deep into the application and perform static and runtime analysis of the app to find more vulnerabilities in it. This stage includes application-specific business logic testing (for example, payment gateway bypass, price manipulation, and so on), which is almost impossible to catch through automated scanning in most cases.

Hope this was helpful.