In today’s digital age, cybersecurity has become a major concern for individuals and organizations alike. As mobile devices continue to grow in popularity, it’s important to ensure that they are secure and protected from potential cyber attacks. One way to do this is through penetration testing or “pentesting.” Pentesting involves simulating a real-world attack on a system or network to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses that can be exploited by attackers.
In this article, we will discuss six must-have tools for Android pentesting that every security-conscious individual or organization should have in their toolkit. With these tools at your disposal, you can rest assured that your Android device is protected against any malicious activity.
1. ADB
Android Debug Bridge (ADB) is a command-line tool that is used to communicate with devices. It has multiple device actions, such as installing the application, debugging, backup, and push or pull data from the device.
2. MobSF
Mobile Security Framework (MobSF) is an automated, all-in-one mobile application (Android/iOS/Windows) pentesting framework capable of performing static, dynamic, and malware analysis. It can be used for effective and fast security analysis of Android, iOS, and Windows mobile applications and support both binaries (APK, IPA, APPX) and zipped source code. MobSF can also perform dynamic testing of the application. You can download MobSF from here.
3. Drozer
Drozer is a comprehensive security and attack framework for Android developed by MWR Labs. It allows you to interact with the Dalvik VM, other apps IPC endpoints, and the underlying OS. You can download Drozer from here.
4. d2j-dex2jar
It is a tool to work with Android .dex and .jar files. This helps convert the .dex file to .class file (zipped jar files). You can download d2j-dex2jar from here.
5. JD-GUI
JD-GUI is a standalone graphical utility that displays the Java source code from the class files. You can download JD-GUI from here.
6. Objection
Objection is a runtime mobile exploration toolkit, powered by Frida. It was built to help assess mobile applications and their security posture without the need for a jailbroken or rooted mobile device. This tool has features like:
- Root detection bypass
- SSL pinning bypass
- Dump Keystore.
- Dump Android Heap.
- Monitors Android copy/paste buffer cache.
- Hook a method(s) of a class in runtime.
- Execute custom Frida scripts.
- Work with the Android intents. You can download it from here.
References:
- https://github.com/sensepost/objection
- https://github.com/frida/frida
- https://www.frida.re/docs/android/
- https://github.com/pxb1988/dex2jar
- https://labs.mwrinfosecurity.com/tools/drozer/
- [https://github.com/MobSF/Mobile-Security-Framework-MobSF](https://github.com/MobSF/Mobile- Security-Framework-MobSF “https://github.com/MobSF/Mobile-Security-Framework-MobSF”)
- https://github.com/java-decompiler/jd-gui
