Next cloud apk analyzed using MobSF

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Next cloud apk analysis using MobSF

Over the past decade or so, mobile technology has become more widespread in each and every parts of our lives. Cell phones and tablets are commonly used to access the internet, run apps, get email, post to social media, and conduct financial and banking transactions, among other things. The use of mobile devices for both personal and professional uses has skyrocketed. The emergence of mobile devices and the proliferation of mobile applications have tremendously aided mobility and flexibility. As a result, there have been concerns raised about maintaining security while traveling in the digital world. The security of mobile devices is becoming more relevant as a cause of concern for users’ privacy.Despite the fact that mobile device manufacturers are concerned about user security and data privacy, using internet-based applications creates substantial hurdles in terms of resolving threats and vulnerabilities while safeguarding a user’s data privacy. The vast majority of software applications are created to do a certain activity and are tailored for a specific set of devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Protecting data on mobile devices is a high-risk activity due to numerous hazards as well as flaws.

Security Issues Faced

The mobile market continues to grow as wireless technology advances and mobile device usage improves. Individuals, society, and organizations have had significant difficulty generating and maintaining secure identities for mobile devices, especially in mobile added value services such as mobile banking, mobile ticketing, and a variety of other services.

Understanding mobile security.

It’s difficult to be secure these days, and our heavy reliance on mobile technology makes it even more difficult. Our cellphones carry personal social media profiles, emails, important texts, and even bank account information. We continue to maintain these data on file despite the fact that they are frequently very sensitive and may contain useful information. Furthermore, the majority of business-to-business transactions are conducted via smartphones. Cellphones are also where most people use social media. So, if a company that does not have their very own mobile or smartphone applications will get immidietly ineffective. It’s no secret that mobile technology is advancing at a breakneck pace. On the internet, there are literally millions and billions of people, many of whom rely heavily on their smartphones. This enormous user base raises a slew of new security and risk concerns,Hence, it is very critical to understand the mobile security framework and defend yourself from potential security threats in order to optimize risks while avoiding any kind of dangers.

What is MobSF ?

MobSF(Mobile Security Framework) is an automated, all in one security assessment framework.It can analyze Android, iOS, and Windows binaries and source codes automatically, but currently it only supports Java and Objective C source codes. MobSF can also be used to capture web traffic from an application, which can subsequently be routed to fuzzing tools like Burp suite and Owasp zap for further more analysis.

MobSF is an open-source security program that is absolutely free. In December of 2014, the project began. Developers from a number of regions are now collaborating on MobSF. MobSF is a great tool for developers because it allows them to find security flaws in their apps while they’re still being developed. It also helps security engineers perform mobile app security audits by allowing them to perform security analysis on both the final production-ready binaries and the source code.

MobSF also has a REST API that DevSecOps experts or anyone can use to incorporate it into their CI/CD pipelines, and malware researchers may use it to quickly detect malicious activity and malware signatures in their applications.It’s also feasible to perform sandbox dynamic runtime analysis and determine the malware’s behavior in real time with the help of MobSF.

MobSF is a self-hosted, and it runs as a web application. It is cross-platform, meaning it runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows operating systems. The MobSF’s static analysis component can be run in a Docker container or on a virtual machine. MobSF must be installed in the host operating system in order to perform dynamic analysis. It won’t support dynamic analysis if it is installed inside a dockerized environment or a virtualualized environment.

Getting started with MobSF.

MobSF is an open-source project that is actively being developed. So, the documentation is subject to change. Therefore, be sure to always use the most up-to-date documentation from MobSF’s official documentation page. There are several methods of Installing and running MobSF:

First Method of installing MobSF:

The first method of installing MobSF is to manually install all of the prerequisite requirements and then run the setup script for your Host Operating System.

Prerequisites requirements

For Mac users

• Install Git
• Install Python 3.8-3.9
• After installing Python 3.8+, go to /Applications/Python 3.8/ and run Update Shell Profile.command first and then Install Certificates.command
• Install JDK 8+
• Install command line tools xcode-select --install
• Download & Install wkhtmltopdf
• Windows App Static analysis requires a Windows Host or Windows VM for Mac and Linux. More Info

For Ubuntu/Debian based Linux users:

• Install Git sudo apt-get install git
• Install Python 3.8-3.9 sudo apt-get install python3.8
• Install JDK 8+ sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk
• Install the following dependencies

sudo apt install python3-dev python3-venv python3-pip build-essential libffi-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev wkhtmltopdf

• Windows App Static analysis requires a Windows Host or Windows VM for Mac and Linux. More info

For Windows users

• Install Git
• Install Python 3.8-3.9
• Install JDK 8+
• Install Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools
• Install OpenSSL (non-light)
• Download & Install wkhtmltopdf .
• Add the folder that contains wkhtmltopdf binary to environment variable PATH.

NOTE: Set JAVA_HOME environment variable. iOS IPA Analysis works only on Mac, Linux and Docker containers.

So, once all of the prerequisites have been installed, you can proceed to the installation stage.

_ Second method of installing MobSF _:

You can always use prebuilt MobSF docker images if you solely need to do static analysis and don’t want to do dynamic analysis. Copy and paste the following commands into the command line to pull and deploy prebuilt MobSF docker images:

Note: Ensure that Docker is running on your computer.

docker pull opensecurity/mobile-security-framework-mobsf

docker run -it --rm -p 8000:8000 opensecurity/mobile-security-framework-mobsf:latest

_ Third method of running MobSF _:

You can use the cloud version of MobSF instead of installing it on your computer if you don’t want to install MobSF on your PC. To do so, go to Mobsf.live.

Static Analysis using MobSF

MobSF Installation

What is a static analysis?

Static analysis, often known as static code analysis, is the practice of looking for faults in a computer program without running it. Static analysis is most typically performed on a program’s source code using tools that convert the code to an abstract syntax tree (AST) in order to completely evaluate the code’s structure and, as a result, find flaws in it. An Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) is a tree representation of a computer program’s source code that shows the source code’s structure.

Let’s get started and run MobSF static analysis.

• First, make sure your host PC has all of the necessary requirements loaded.
• Then, clone the entire repository in a specific folder on your computer.

Note: We’ll be using ‘Windows’ as the host operating system and FreeOTP apk ‘Android’ apk binaries for static/dynamic analysis in this tutorial.

• Installing all the dependencies.

For Linux / mac:

./setup.sh

For Windows:

./setup.bat

• Now, execute the Run command.

For Linux & mac:

./run.sh

For Windows:

./run.bat

MobSF is now immediately accessible from the browser. Simply drag & drop or pick the apk file you want to study to begin the static analysis process.

Features of MobSF static analysis

Information Section:

The app’s various scores, such as the average CVSS, security score, and number of recognized trackers, are displayed in this section at the top. The file’s name, size, and basic hashes are displayed in the File information section, which is positioned next to the App score. The App Information part, which appears next to the File Information section, offers numerous characteristics about the app, such as the package name, main activity, and current version of the application.

APP scores

The app’s various scores are displayed in this section, including the average CVSS, security score, and number of trackers recognized.

MobSF scorecard

This section shows a visual representation of the scores for several findings in a very great detail.

The average CVSS score is determined by calculating the average CVSS score, whereas the Security score is decided by the severity.

Perfect score of 100 is awarded to each application but MobSF deducts 15 points from the score for each finding with a high severity. For each finding with a severity warning, MobSF subtracts ten points and adds five to the score for each finding with a good severity. The app security score is deemed 100 as long as the calculated score is more than 100. If the estimated value is less than 0, the app security score is assigned a value of 10.

File information

The File information section, which is located next to the App score, displays the file’s name, size, and basic hashes.

App Information

The App Information section, which resides next to the File Information section, contains information about the app's package name, main activity, and current version of the application.

Playstore description

This section will simply list out the app’s description published on the Google Play Store.

Component section

The various fundamental components used in Android apps are listed in this section, including Activities (a single screen in your app with a user-interactive interface), Services (a background-running part of the app), Receivers (allows users to register for system or application events), and Providers (provides its own UI for working with the data).

Scan Option

This features include options such as Rescan and dynamic analysis. Not only that, but it also has a decompiled code section that displays decompiled versions of android manifest files, java source code, and smali source code, as well as the ability to download the java source code, smali code, and even the apk file itself.

Signer Certificate

Basic information about a code signing certificate may be found in the Signer Certificate section, which contains the signature version, hash techniques used, fingerprints, and issuer identifications. If anything good or bad is detected, it will be mentioned in the certificate status box along with its brief description.

Application permission

All of the permissions used by the application (Next cloud apk) are listed in the Permissions section, along with their status, information, and descriptions.

Android API

This section provides all the information related to each and every API which is being used inside this particular application.

Browsable activities

This Browsable activities section will simply lists out all the browsable activities, such as all the activities which can be browsed by a particular scheme.

Security Analysis:

The security analysis section includes manifest, code, binary, NIAP, and file analysis.

Network Security

This section will lists out all network-related and configuration issues found in the examined application, along with their brief status and descriptions.

Manifest Analysis

MobSF runs a static analysis on Android Manifest files to find any vulnerabilities. It then lists all of the issues/concerns, as well as their severity and a full description, inside this section.

Code analysis

MobSF performs static analysis on all decompiled java source code and then provides a report that includes all issues encountered, as well as their severity, standard, and file location, which is displayed in this section.

Binary Analysis

MobSF lists out all of the issues that have been detected on the shared objects and displays it inside this particular section.

NIAP Analysis

The Department of Defense and other government agencies must ensure that their mobile apps meet the National Information Assurance Partnership’s security guidelines (NIAP). The National Intelligence Assessment Program (NIAP) certifies commercial hardware and software used in national security systems. So this section will showcase all of the NIAP results, including their Identifier, requirement, characteristics, and brief explanations.

File analysis

Currently it is absolutely blank but inside this section MobSF lists out all of the sensitive files, such as certificates, that are hard coded within the application.

Malware analysis

APKiD analysis

This section gives detailed information and a picture of the application’s behavior from a code perspective.

Server location

This section includes a lovely World Map UI that displays the assessed app’s entire server location in pin-point accuracy.

Quark analysis

Domain malware check

MobSF retrieves domains from binaries and compares them to non-malicious domains stored in its database. As a result, it uses this information to determine if a domain is good or bad.

Reconnassance

URLs

MobSf will list and display all of the URLs found in the various source code files for that application in this section.

Firebase DB

MobSf is capable of extracting all the firebase database URL from the application , and it also performs an additional check to see if the database is exposed to the internet.

Emails

MobSF is able to extract all of the emails contained in the source code and displays them in this particular section.

Trackers

MobSF is capable of extracting out all the possible trackers that are currently being used inside the application and display it inside this particular section.

Trackers are simply a development toolkits or add-ons that collect data and information on the application’s behalf.

Strings

MobSF lists out all the hard coded strings in the binary, especially the ones from the strings resource.

Possible hardcoded secrets

Components

Components refer to the different sections of the application. This section includes a list of all the activities, services, receivers, providers, and libraries that this application uses.

Activities

Activities are nothing more than a single screen in your program with a user-interactive interface.

Services

Services are part of application which runs in the background.

Receviers

Receviers allows users to register for system or in any kind of application events.

Providers

Providers provides its own UI for working with the data.

PDF report

The PDF report section allows you to create a professional-looking PDF report that contains high-level information about the various findings of that particular analyzed application.

Visit this link to see the full report on this Nect cloud apk application.

What is Dynamic analysis ?

Dynamic analysis is the process of testing and analyzing a program while the application is running. Dynamic analysis, also known as dynamic code scanning, which aids in the detection and correction of errors, memory issues, memory leaks and several other issues with program execution.

Dynamic analysis mechanism

MobSf will first install the apk on the genymotion vm before instrumenting it.Xposed and Frida are used for instrumentation; Frida is used for Android 5.0 and up, and Xposed is used for Android 5.0 and below. There are some agents deployed in the genymotion VM as well. The agents will start capturing and gathering data relevant to the app once it has been instrumented. The collected data will be emailed back to MobSF after the report is completed, and the app’s full data will be dumped into the device for additional study.

Always make sure you’ve configured the dynamic analyzer for MobSF before starting the analysis. You must start a genymotion VM before launching MobSF to perform android dynamic analysis flawlessly.

This error will be thrown if mobsf fails to detect the vurtual machine.

You must start a genymotion VM before launching MobSF to perform android dynamic analysis without any issues.

Starting Dynamic analysis

Open scan options and click on Start Dynamic Analysis.

OR

If everything went well, you should be able to see the dashboard.

MobSF Dynamic analysis features and functionality:

Show/Stop Screen:

This feature provides the functionailty to displays the screen of the emulated device on the web interface. Some fundamental functions, including as touches and clicks, can be performed straight from the web interface.

Remove Root Certificate(CA):

This feature is responsible for directly intercepting with the traffic of the device.

TLS / SSL test:

TLS/SSL Security test allows you to assess the network security of your application. These tests are only applicable to applications that connect to the internet using the HTTP protocol.

• TLS Misconfiguration Test - This test will uncover insecure configurations that allow HTTPS connections bypassing certificate errors or SSL/TLS errors in WebViews. This is equivalent to not having TLS.
• TLS Pinning/Certificate Transparency Test - This test will evaluate the application’s TLS/SSL hardening controls and will check if the application implement certificate or public key pinning and or certificate transparency.
• TLS Pinning/Certificate Transparency Bypass Test - This test tries to bypass certificate or public key pinning and or certificate transparency controls in your application. MobSF can bypass most of the generic implementations.

NOTE: For Better results, while the application is running, navigate through different business logic flows that will trigger network connections over HTTP protocol. Make sure that no other applications are running during the test.

Exported Activity Tester:

This test allows you to dynamically test for exported actions, which is useful for creating dynamic proofs of concepts and confirming static analysis results.

Activity Tester:

This test can be used to force-test all non-exported activities.

Get Dependencies:

This functionality helps in the gathering of all information regarding the application’s runtime dependencies.

Take Screenshots:

This feature allows you to take a screenshot of a device that is currently running in a virtual machine.

Logcat Stream:

The Logcat stream shows all of the device’s logs in real time.

A new window will be opened

At the present, MobSF is unable to do autonomous dynamic analysis. This is due to MobSF’s lack of understanding of your app’s business logic, how to fill in the login and password fields, or what data it should offer. You must manually walk through the application’s different business logic and obstacles to get the most out of MobSF dynamic analysis, while MobSF does security analysis on these issues in the background.

Initializing the Dynamic Analysis Process :

The initial stage in the dynamic analysis process is to select start instrumentation, which will load the application and enable MobSF to instrument it.

Instrumentation with Frida

Use the console to see the output created by these Frida scripts, or look in the Frida live logs folder. Whether you’re running a custom Frida script or writing one, Frida live logs will show you all of the output from the various Frida scripts.

The Live API monitor button will be enabled once the instrumentation process is complete. The live API monitor simply logs all API calls made during the application’s runtime.

Frida Code editor

MobSF dynamic analyzer also provides access to the Frida code editor where custom or pre-built Frida scripts can be loaded.

Generate Report:

MobSF is advised to stop all analysis and generate a report when the Generate Report option is selected.After the dynamic analysis is completed, the final report should look somewhat like this.

Click here to see the full dynamic analysis report of the Next cloud apk application.

Closing

MobSF is a very useful tool for developers because it helps them find security flaws in apps while they’re still being developed, as well as do static analysis directly on the source code of those apps. It also aids security engineers in performing mobile app security audits by allowing them to conduct security analysis on both the final production-ready binaries and source code. MobSF also offers a REST API that DevSecOps professionals may use to integrate it directly into CI/CD pipelines, and malware researchers can use to quickly and effectively discover harmful behavior and malware signatures in applications.This article may have been entertaining as well as instructive in terms of how to install MobSF and use it from the ground up on a variety of platforms. Join Aviyel’s community to learn more about the open source project, get tips on how to contribute, and join active dev groups.

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