Diving straight into reverse-engineering iOS apps can be daunting and time-consuming. While wading into the binary can pay off greatly in the long run, it’s also useful to start off with the easy wins, especially when you have limited time and resources. One such easy win is hunting login credentials and API keys in iOS applications.

I wanted to get into mobile app pentesting. While it’s relatively easy to get started on Android, it’s harder to do so with iOS. For example, while Android has Android Virtual Device and a host of other third-party emulators, iOS only has a Xcode’s iOS Simulator, which mimics the software environment of an iPhone and not the hardware. As such, iOS app pentesting requires an actual OS device.