Protection And Reinforcement Technologies For IOS Applications

iOS system is very popular and recognized as a more secure mobile operating system in the mobile Internet era,with the number of users behind Android.iOS Applications are developed by third party developers,available for users to download through Apple's App Store,and eventually run on iOS devices.With the rapid development of mobile Internet,iOS applications have seen explosive growth in the number.Although Apple has taken a number of protection measures on system security and user privacy,applications that run on a jail-broken iOS device will no longer be protected,and the risk of being attacked will greatly increase.In that case,iOS application protection and reinforcement work can only be done by the developers themselves.However,there are still many iOS application being released to the App Store without any protection.Therefore,a proven set of security technologies for third-party application developers to preventing their iOS application from reverse engineering and attack is desperately needed.Currently,most academic research focus on the iOS system security and user privacy-related protection,but only few research on protecting and reinforcing technologies for iOS applications.The main goal of this paper is to provide a practical security service for iOS developers to protect and reinforce their apps.This paper mainly completes the following research:(1)iOS application security situation is analyzed in this paper,as well as the principle of iOS application reverse engineering and attack,and the deficiencies of the existing protection technologies.An iOS application hardening model,PRiOS and its implementation were proposed,which can be performed on iOS application to protect against class-dump attack,static disassembly analysis,dynamic debug analysis,and iOS runtime attack.(2)This paper also present technology of ARM instrumentation insertion and binary rewriting of the Mach-O executable file.Based on these technologies,we implement protection and reinforcement technologies for iOS applications such as data segment encryption,ARM instruction obfuscation,jailbreak detection,anti-debugging protection and anti-dylib-injection protection.(3)We select real-world iOS applications for PRiOS test,the test results show that PRiOS can provide effective protection and reinforcement for iOS applications.Compared to the existing protection technologies,the given PRiOS hardening service does not require source code of application,and will not change the application's main function,and almost not affect the application's performance.It can be seamlessly applied to the process of iOS application development and release to meet the needs of iOS application protection and reinforcement.