Introduction

Today, smartphone usage is a much talked about subject. The world is quickly moving towards smartphone ownership, rather than traditional feature phones. Various studies and surveys have predicted increasing future usage of smartphones and tablets. There are incentives to do so; a lot of things are doable with these smartphones.

With increasing mobility comes risk. Attackers or cyber criminals look at all possible ways to attack users in order to obtain their personal data, credit card details, passwords, and other secrets. There have been threat reports from various security vendors on the increase in mobile attacks that comes with increased usage. Today, corporations are worried about data confidentiality and the resultant financial and reputational losses.

In this book, we introduce readers to some mobile device exploitation recipes, to let everyone understand the kind of attacks that are possible. Once people understand this, they will be more aware of such attack vectors and be better prepared to deal with them and secure their stuff.

This chapter will give the reader an idea about the basic security models of the two most popular mobile device platforms, Android and iOS. We will cover an introduction to their development environments and basic security models. We will set up a penetration testing environment and will introduce you to rooting and jailbreaking. This chapter builds the foundation for what is to be covered in the upcoming chapters, and is a pre-requisite for exploitation.