Android

In a previous blogpost, I described how Google Play’s SafetyNet service is structured, from a technical perspective, diving deep into details and the checks it perfoms on the device. Recap: Google Play’s SafetyNet service allows your application to gain information about the ‘CTS compatibility’ status of the device you are running on. You can think of CTS compatibility as a mix of rooting detection, device tampering detection and active MitM detection. »

This post is part of a series: Inside SafetyNet part 1 (Oct 2015) Inside SafetyNet part 2 (Feb 2016) Inside SafetyNet part 3 (Nov 2016) How to implement Attestation securely using server-side checks (my blog, Cigital blog) SafetyNet Playground (POC server-side implementation) Play Store - Android source - PHP source What is SafetyNet The Android Pay application got released a few days ago. Some people using rooted devices discovered that it refused to work. »

A couple of days ago the following two tweets appeared on my twitter feed: I had no idea you could remove code using proguard. neat. http://t.co/7ljGEv2vpx — Joshua J. Drake (@jduck) June 29, 2015 @jduck yep, I use this to remove debug code at run time — Justin Case (@jcase) June 29, 2015 These tweets reminded me of something: If you’re an Android developer and you want to use ProGuard’s code removal feature to remove your logs and use method renaming at the same time, be careful. »

A week ago, during WWDC, Apple announced App Transport Security (ATS) for iOS 9. This feature will allow app developers to specify which domains their app needs to communicate with over HTTPS. In principle, for those domains, cleartext traffic will be automatically blocked by the system. What about Android? Google has not yet announced it officially, but the next Android version (codenamed Android M) has a “similar” feature. The code that includes this has actually been around for a while before Apple’s WWDC conference, but no-one seems to have picked it up. »

Substrate is one of the best dynamic instrumentation frameworks. It is very flexible and allows you to easily hook various Java, Objective-C or native C/C++ of your Android or iOS apps. It can even hook non-exported functions, but that’s a matter for another blog post. I use Substrate quite a lot during mobile app security testing, along with various other tools. This post is the second of a two part walkthrough on hooking C code on iOS and Android platforms using Substrate. »