You're reading from Mobile App Reverse Engineering Get started with discovering, analyzing, and exploring the internals of Android and iOS apps

Product type Paperback

Published in May 2022

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781801073394

Length 166 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Tools

Android

Concepts

Reverse Engineering

Author (1):

Abhinav Mishra

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Table of Contents (13) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: Basics of Mobile App Reverse Engineering, Common Tools and Techniques, and Setting up the Environment

2. Chapter 1: Basics of Reverse Engineering – Understanding the Structure of Mobile Apps FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Setting Up a Mobile App Reverse Engineering Environment Using Modern Tools

4. Section 2: Mobile Application Reverse Engineering Methodology and Approach

5. Chapter 3: Reverse Engineering an Android Application

6. Chapter 4: Reverse Engineering an iOS Application

7. Chapter 5: Reverse Engineering an iOS Application (Developed Using Swift)

8. Section 3: Automating Some Parts of the Reverse Engineering Process

9. Chapter 6: Open Source and Commercial Reverse Engineering Tools

10. Chapter 7: Automating the Reverse Engineering Process

11. Chapter 8: Conclusion

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Modifying and recompiling the application

Often, it is necessary to not just reverse engineer the application, but also change something, and then repack it. To create a modified APK, you will need to recompile the modified code and then sign the APK again.

Let's say we want to modify the encryption key in the application and then recompile it. To do so, you will need to perform the following steps:

Decompile the APK. We have already decompiled the SecureStorage application using apktool, with the #apktool d app-debug.apk command.
The decompilation process will provide us with the required smali files. So, let's open the EncryptionUtils.smali file.
In this smali file, we can change the value of the encryption key to something else, such as abcdef12345.
To recompile the application, we can again use apktool. Run the #apktool b command. Ensure that this command runs in the same directory where the application was extracted. It will compile the new...