Hacking and Securing iOS Applications

If you’re an app developer with a solid foundation in Objective-C, this book is an absolute must—chances are very high that your company’s iOS applications are vulnerable to attack. That’s because malicious attackers now use an arsenal of tools to reverse-engineer, trace, and manipulate applications in ways that most programmers aren’t aware of.

This guide illustrates several types of iOS attacks, as well as the tools and techniques that hackers use. You’ll learn best practices to help protect your applications, and discover how important it is to understand and strategize like your adversary.

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• •  Examine subtle vulnerabilities in real-world applications—and avoid the same problems in your apps
• •  Learn how attackers infect apps with malware through code injection
• •  Discover how attackers defeat iOS keychain and data-protection encryption
• •  Use a debugger and custom code injection to manipulate the runtime Objective-C environment
• •  Prevent attackers from hijacking SSL sessions and stealing traffic
• •  Securely delete files and design your apps to prevent forensic data leakage
• •  Avoid debugging abuse, validate the integrity of run-time classes, and make your code harder to trace

  About the Author

Jonathan Zdziarski is better known as the hacker “NerveGas” in the iOSdevelopment community. His work in cracking the iPhone helped lead theeffort to port the first open source applications to it, and his bookiPhone Open Application Development taught developers how to writeapplications for the popular device long before Apple introduced itsown SDK. Jonathan is also the author of many other books, includingiPhone SDK Application Development and iPhone Forensics. Jonathanpresently supports over 2,000 law enforcement agencies worldwide anddistributes a suite of iOS forensic imaging tools to obtain evidencefrom iOS devices for criminal cases. He frequently consults and trainslaw enforcement agencies and assists forensic examiners in theirinvestigations.

Jonathan is also a full-time Sr. Forensic Scientist, where, amongother things, he performs penetration testing of iOS applications forcorporate clients.