The Mobile Application Hacker's Handbook

CHAPTER 10Analyzing Windows Phone Applications

Windows Phone (WP) 8 and 8.1 are arguably two of the most secure mobile operating systems on the market at the time of this writing. Indeed, in contrast to other mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android, WP8 and 8.1 and their Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) devices have not been publicly vulnerable to a long string of jailbreaking and security vulnerabilities.

Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 are built on top of the NT kernel technology. The older Windows Phone OSes, 7.x (and the even older Windows Mobile OSes) differ from Windows Phone 8.x in that their cores were made up of the CE kernel instead.

The market has shifted recently. Whereas Windows Phones previously seemed quite far behind the rest of the mobile arena, their market share increase now places them in third place, one place higher than BlackBerry devices. This makes Windows Phone devices very viable options for Windows Phone development, and as a consequence, application security research.

In this book we stick to the more recent Windows Phone operating systems, WP8 and WP8.1, though much of the content we discuss in the following four chapters may be relevant when assessing legacy WP7 applications as well.

Before delving into attacking and code auditing Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 applications in Chapter 11, this chapter first explores Windows Phone 8 and 8.1’s various security features, and then covers how to build an environment suitable for carrying out security ...