Hacking and Securing iOS Applications: Stealing Data, Hijacking Software, and How to Prevent It

by Jonathan Zdziarski

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.

354 pages, Paperback

First published January 17, 2012

Reviews

[m ko · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book shows the other side of Apple’s devices. Less secure one. We all are told that iOS based devices are secure due to restrictions applied by Apple. This is not exactly true. Well, there is always the other side of the coin.

When I started the book I simply dived into it. I read it over one evening. Jonathan takes you on the journey over the low level layers of iOS development and shows what bad guys can do when they put their hands on your “precious”. He presents how to jailbreak device, how to access common data, how to retrieve information from the device, how to manipulate it and how to compromise it. After various malicious behavior is described, Jonathan shows how to make your own applications more bullet proof. How to avoid caching, how to encrypt better, how to detect jailbreaked devices. Last topics is particularly interesting for people who develop proprietary software and want to make sure it will not be compromised by irresponsible users. You will also learn few interesting debugging techniques and find loots of references to other sources related to the topic.

Book is both rewarding and demanding at the same time. If you are an iOS newbie, you’d better learn more about Objective-C, shell and iOS SDK before you start this one. Contrary, if you are familiar with mentioned topics already, and you know some basics of assembler, go ahead and buy this one.

Note!! To fully benefit from the book you will need a device that you can jailbreak. Otherwise you won’t be able to follow all exercises.

[Janno Teelem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some great examples very well explained, but somewhat repetitive and not very practical for most iOS apps.

[Matt Garden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative, with code samples and everything. I'll definitely think about iOS development (and software development generally) differently.