Mobile Application Penetration Testing

The iOS application structure

Now that we have understood the iOS security model and its permissions, we will see how all the compiled application code, resources, and application metadata required to define a complete application are zipped and signed with the developer's certificate and finally issued as an iOS app store package (iPA). The structural representation of an iOS application would typically be as shown in this diagram:

When an iPA file is opened with any archiving software such as 7-Zip, WinRAR, and so on, you can see the following:

• Payload: This folder contains all the application data
  • Application.app: This folder contains all the following ...