During a mobile penetration test you need to trace Objective-C method calls inside a third-party banking application that is installed on an employee's non-jailbroken iPhone running iOS 15. You have the device's UDID and access to a macOS workstation with Xcode and an Apple developer account. Which technique will let you instrument the app at run-time without first jailbreaking the device?
Edit the app's Info.plist to disable code-signing enforcement and reinstall the modified package without resigning.
Install Cydia Substrate through Cydia and use MobileSubstrate hooks to intercept the app's Objective-C methods.
Repackage the IPA with Frida Gadget, re-sign it using a developer profile in Xcode, and sideload it to the device for dynamic instrumentation.
Enable SSH over USB and set the DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES variable to inject a custom dylib when the app starts.
Frida supports "dynamic instrumentation on jailed devices" through its preload component called Frida Gadget. The tester can unpack the target IPA, embed the FridaGadget.dylib inside the application bundle, update the Executable Loader entry in the app's Info.plist, re-sign the modified IPA with a valid (personal or enterprise) developer certificate in Xcode, and then sideload it to the device using the UDID. When the user launches the repackaged app, FridaGadget is automatically loaded, allowing the tester to attach to the process from a desktop and intercept or modify Objective-C methods at run-time-without requiring a jailbreak.
Cydia Substrate and DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES rely on jailbreak privileges to load unsigned code, so they will not work on a stock (jailed) device. Simply removing the code-signing requirement in Info.plist will cause the app to fail signature validation at installation or launch.
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What is an IPA file, and how is it used in this context?
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What is code signing and why is it necessary when sideloading apps to iOS?
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