Chapter 7: Automating the Reverse Engineering Process

During a penetration test or malware analysis, reverse engineering is generally performed on one binary (or application) at a time because the aim of reverse engineering is to analyze a single application. However, there can be cases when you need to quickly analyze a lot of applications for some generic details. For example, you want to find out whether a specific method is being used in any of the applications you are working on, or you want to find out whether a specific string (or strings) is a part of any of the available application binaries.

In such cases, it would be really helpful if you could automate these tasks. A static analysis is often the very first step during a black box penetration test of a mobile application. The static analysis helps to quickly analyze the application based on the reverse engineered code, extract strings, analyze the binary for some basic protections, and can also perform a quick malware...