Mobile Security Framework: MobSF

July 16, 2017 Comments Off

Mobile Security Framework is an intelligent, all-in-one open source mobile application (Android/iOS) automated pen-testing framework capable of performing static and dynamic analysis.

We’ve been depending on multiple tools to carry out reversing, decoding, debugging, code review, and pen-test and this process requires a lot of effort and time. Mobile Security Framework can be used for effective and fast security analysis of Android and iOS Applications. It supports binaries (APK & IPA) and zipped source code.

The static analyzer is able to perform automated code review, detect insecure permissions and configurations, and detect insecure code like ssl overriding, ssl bypass, weak crypto, obfuscated codes, improper permissions, hardcoded secrets, improper usage of dangerous APIs, leakage of sensitive/PII information, and insecure file storage. The dynamic analyzer runs the application in a VM or on a configured device and detects the issues at run time. Further analysis is done on the captured network packets, decrypted HTTPS traffic, application dumps, logs, error or crash reports, debug information, stack trace, and on the application assets like setting files, preferences, and databases. This framework is highly scalable that you can add your custom rules with ease. A quick and clean report can be generated at the end of the tests. This framework is expected to extend to support other mobile platforms like Tizen, WindowsPhone etc. in future.

Mobile Security Framework Requirements

Python 2.7 – https://www.python.org/downloads/
Oracle JDK 1.7 or above – http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/
Oracle VirtualBox – https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
iOS IPA binary analysis requires MAC OS X and you need to install Command-line tools for MAC OS X http://osxdaily.com/2014/02/12/install-command-line-tools-mac-os-x/
Hardware Requirements: Min 4GB RAM and 5GB HDD.

NOTE:

On Linux and Mac, install Oracle Java 1.7 or above and make it the default one.

Installation

Tested on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, Ubuntu, OSX Mavericks

Windows: Extract the MobSF compressed file to C:\MobSF
Mac: Extract MobSF compressed file to /Users/[username]/MobSF
Linux: Extract MobSF compressed file to /home/[username]/MobSF

Configuring Static Analyzer

Install MobSF Python dependencies using pip

Windows

C:\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe install -r requirements.txt

NOTE: If pip.exe is not available in Scripts directory, Download and Re-install latest Python2.7.

Unix

pip.exe install -r requirements.txt

Running MobSF

python manage.py runserver

If you need to run on a specific port number try

python manage.py runserver PORT_NO

If everything goes right, you will get an output like the one below.

Configuring Dynamic Analyzer

Dynamic Anlayzer is available only for Android binaries (APK) and works only if your computer has at least 4GB of RAM and Full Virtualization support.

To Configure Dynamic Analyzer we need 4 things.