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Mobile Scan Prerequisites

Overview

Ostorlab performs static, dynamic and behavioral analysis of mobile applications. These capabilities use a large spectrum of engines, tools and techniques to work around production app constraints and evaluate their security.

We generally recommend testing applications with the full spectrum of protections enabled to validate the impact of these protections, as well as disabling them to compare if any additional findings were reported and missed because of these protections.

Protection Mechanisms That Affect Testing

1. Obfuscation

Code obfuscation transforms readable source code into a functionally equivalent but difficult-to-understand version, making reverse engineering more challenging.

Impact on Testing: Code obfuscation renders stack traces difficult to read by developers to know where to apply fixes.

2. TLS Pinning

Certificate pinning validates that the app only communicates with legitimate servers by hardcoding the expected server's certificate or public key.

Impact on Testing: May prevent traffic interception in very rare cases. Ostorlab has robust TLS pinning bypasses in place.

3. Runtime Protection

Runtime protection mechanisms detect and prevent tampering, debugging, or instrumentation attempts while the application is running.

Impact on Testing: Prevents instrumentation or patching of the application for dynamic analysis.

4. Prevention of Developer Mode

Detection and blocking of developer settings, USB debugging, and debug connections that could be used for application analysis.

Impact on Testing: Prevents use of debug protocols for application instrumentation.

5. Disabling Screenshot

Security feature that prevents capturing screenshots of application screens.

Impact on Testing: Prevents taking screenshots and might slightly hinder automated exploration and crawling of the application.

  1. Run with all protections enabled
  2. Run with developer mode detection disabled (if applicable)
  3. Run with all protections disabled

This three-phase approach ensures comprehensive security assessment by validating protection effectiveness while identifying all potential vulnerabilities.