Reverse engineering of iOS
apps to find security issues

Kristaps Felzenbergs

Kristaps from TestDevLab company, discussed involvement in security projects, particularly focusing on web and Android projects, but also delving into iOS applications. Throughout the speech, Kristaps covers basic concepts of application reverse engineering, emphasizing the importance of understanding an application's implementation and design details to enhance its security.

Kristaps explains how reverse engineering can be a security threat to various types of applications, such as instant messengers, banking, and payment solutions, due to the sensitive data he handle. He highlights the importance of implementing security measures like anti-debugging techniques, data encryption, and code obfuscation to protect against reverse engineering attempts.

The speech also introduces different categories of tools used in reverse engineering, including monitors (for monitoring and recording behaviors), assemblers (for converting binaries into assembly code), debuggers (such as Xcode), and development kits (like iOS OpenDev Toolkit). Kristaps provides examples of tools within each category and briefly demonstrates how to extract method headers from an iOS application binary using a tool called "class-dump."

Overall, Kristaps aims to raise awareness about the security vulnerabilities inherent in iOS applications and provide developers with insights and tools to mitigate these risks.

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