Month: June 2013

Injecting Reveal With MobileSubstrate

Reveal is a cool prototyping tool allowing you to perform runtime inspection of an iOS application. At the moment, its functionality revolved primarily around user interface design, allowing you to manage user interface objects and their behavior. It is my hope that in the future, Reveal will expand to be a full featured debugging tool, allowing pen-testers to inspect and modify instance variables in memory, instantiate new objects, invoke methods, and generally hack on the runtime of an iOS application. At the moment, it’s still a pretty cool user interface design aid. Reveal is designed to be linked with your project, meaning you have to have the source code of the application you want to inspect. This is a quick little instructional on how to link the reveal framework with any existing application on your iOS device, so that you can inspect it without source.

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How Juice Jacking Works, and Why It’s a Threat

How ironic that only a week or two after writing an article about pair locking,  we would see this talk coming out of Black Hat 2013, demonstrating how juice jacking can be used to install malicious software. The talk is getting a lot of buzz with the media, but many security guys like myself are scratching our heads wondering why this is being considered “new” news. Granted, I can only make statements based on the abstract of the talk, but all signs seem to point to this as a regurgitation of the same type of juice jacking talks we saw at DefCon two years ago. Nevertheless, juice jacking is not only technically possible, but has been performed in the wild for a few years now. I have my own juice jacking rig, which I use for security research, and I have also retrofitted my iPad Mini with a custom forensics toolkit, capable of performing a number of similar attacks against iOS devices. Juice jacking may not be anything new, but it is definitely a serious consideration for potential high profile targets, as well as for those serious about data privacy.

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