Mobile application security testing (APK / IPA)

Already live in the product

This engagement can align with shipped product capabilities in your tenant workspace.

Included in the Infronest workspace

These capabilities ship in the product today—consulting adds human validation and attestation where required.

What you get

Delivered with AI-assisted engineering and human review on architecture, security, and production readiness.

What teams can do here

How it works

A worked example

What static analysis of a mobile binary actually finds

The uploaded build is unpacked and inspected exactly as an attacker would receive it: the analyzers read requested permissions, storage and backup flags, embedded certificates, transport-security settings and bundled resources, and hunt for hardcoded secrets such as API keys or tokens left inside the package. Because the input is the compiled artifact, the assessment reflects what actually ships to users — not what the source tree suggests should ship.

Each finding is mapped to the OWASP Mobile Top 10 category and the MASVS control it implicates, so the report reads as a standards checklist rather than a raw tool dump. Insecure local storage, cleartext transport, over-broad permissions and leaked credentials are the classes that surface most often in first-time assessments, and each carries enough context for a developer to locate and fix the issue without a security specialist translating.

Static analysis also has honest limits: runtime behaviour — how the app validates input, manages sessions, or resists tampering on a rooted or jailbroken device — cannot always be judged from the binary. Controls that need that context are flagged for human review or a scoped consulting exercise instead of being silently asserted, which is what keeps the report defensible in front of a reviewer.

Android and iOS builds are read differently

For Android, the APK or AAB manifest yields permissions, exported components and the network-security configuration, so issues like cleartext traffic being permitted or a debuggable release build are caught directly from the artifact. Storage patterns — world-readable shared preferences, sensitive files on external storage — are checked against the MASVS storage controls, and the signing certificate is inspected as part of upload verification.

For iOS, the IPA’s Info.plist and entitlements expose App Transport Security exceptions, background modes and URL schemes, and the bundle is searched for embedded secrets and weak transport settings. No developer account or source access is needed for either platform: you upload the artifact, its integrity is verified, and analysis starts from the same bytes your users install.

Assessing both platforms in one engagement keeps parity honest. A hardening fix applied in the Android build but missed in the iOS release shows up as a difference between the two reports — rather than going unnoticed until a store review, a customer’s security team, or a bug-bounty submission finds it first.

Where the mobile assessment stops and API testing begins

A mobile binary is only half the attack surface — the APIs it calls carry most of the authentication, authorisation and data-exposure risk. The mobile assessment deliberately scopes to the app package; the endpoints behind it belong in a dedicated API security engagement, where role-matrix replay can catch BOLA and broken function-level authorisation that no amount of binary analysis will reveal.

Teams shipping a mobile product typically pair the two: a binary assessment before each store release, and an API engagement on the backend quarterly or after significant changes. Both live on the same workbench in the VAPT platform, so a reviewer gets one PDF per engagement covering the full mobile picture.

Version-over-version comparison closes the release loop. Every release candidate is re-uploaded and compared with the last assessed build, so a regression — say a cleartext flag re-enabled during debugging — is caught before rollout rather than after, and the comparison history doubles as evidence that mobile security is a process, not a one-off scan.

Frequently asked questions

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