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Platform
ios
MASVS v1 MSTG-RESILIENCE-4
MASVS v2 MASVS-RESILIENCE-4
Last updated: May 08, 2023

Testing Reverse Engineering Tools Detection

Overview

Launch the app with various reverse engineering tools and frameworks installed on your test device, such as Frida, Cydia Substrate, Cycript or SSL Kill Switch.

The app should respond in some way to the presence of those tools. For example by:

  • Alerting the user and asking for accepting liability.
  • Preventing execution by gracefully terminating.
  • Securely wiping any sensitive data stored on the device.
  • Reporting to a backend server, e.g, for fraud detection.

Next, work on bypassing the detection of the reverse engineering tools and answer the following questions:

  • Can the mechanisms be bypassed trivially (e.g., by hooking a single API function)?
  • How difficult is identifying the detection code via static and dynamic analysis?
  • Did you need to write custom code to disable the defenses? How much time did you need?
  • What is your assessment of the difficulty of bypassing the mechanisms?