Apktool VS pwndbg

App tampering and repackaging can be performed by using reverse engineering or tampering tools, such as Apktool, dex2jar, etc.

Apktool made by iBotPeaches, this uses v2.9.1

Can someone clarify what "PP tools" are, and provide a link to them? I came across this link (https://apktool.org/) but I'm not sure if it's the right tool.

Apktool is all you need most of the time.

But it'll still be editable and we can make something good out of it. One of the famous ones, that I'm planning to use is ApkTool(https://ibotpeaches.github.io/Apktool/).

I did a dissection of twitter apk (got from apk pure) with apktool, and I found permission :

Not sure. I started reverse engineering Java apps very early in my life — initially it was J2ME games. Decompilers of the time sucked but that didn't stop me from modding Gravity Defied :P

I honestly don't know what's a good way of getting started on reverse engineering. There's a bunch of everything about Windows executables in particular, including "crackmes", but native machine code is a level up from JVM bytecode. Java classes and Android dex files can be decompiled back to sensible source with a good chance that you get something that can be compiled again. No such luck for native code — C/C++ compilation is a lossy process by its nature, especially the optimizations. Ghidra does a decent job but still requires a non-zero amount of manual assistance. Flash games also were good to hone one's reverse engineering skills since ActionScript decompilers did a pretty darn good job.

Anyway. To decompile dex to Java source, there's jadx: https://github.com/skylot/jadx

Since decompilation is sometimes lossy, there's apktool for when you want to put the app back together after tinkering with it: https://github.com/iBotPeaches/Apktool

It goes without saying that you also need a JDK and the Android SDK. In particular, you need apksigner form the SDK to sign the unsigned apks generated by apktool. You can also automate things a bit and use adb to deploy them to your device.

What I usually do is get a high-level overview of the app in jadx, and then modify the smali (dalvik bytecode in text form, very assembly-like) files generated by apktool.

I am not game or android app dev, but you might first need to de-compile apk using tools like https://ibotpeaches.github.io/Apktool/

By far the best debugger for C is gdb+pwndbg (https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg)

There are a lot of these types of tools already in the reverse engineering community (in order of lowest chance of breaking when you throw really weird stuff at it):

GEF: https://gef.readthedocs.io/en/master/

PWNDBG: https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg

PEDA: https://github.com/longld/peda

They also come with a slew of different features to aid in RE/exploit dev, but many of them are also useful for debugging really weird issues.

GDB is great. I definitely recommend checking out watchpoints as well, a very useful tool for monitoring how a variable changes over time.

GDB also has many good plugins - pwndbg has tons of features and UI improvements over stock GDB.

https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg

I've recently started a new semester for my Master's program, and the first project for the semester involves using the GDB tool (GNU Debugger) to analyze a stack on a simple C program that contains a buffer overflow vulnerability. A couple of semesters ago, I had been given a VM pre-loaded with a more featured debugger tool called pwndbg. Pwndbg was excellent because it was easy to use and easily allowed accessed to information such as current assembly code being executed and a view of the program registers. So, going back to using GDB felt a little like stepping back into the stone age.

Pwndbg - A GDB plugin that provides a suite of utilities to hack around GDB easily.

i have peda installed on my gdb and now i am trying to install pwndbg with git clone https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg cd pwndbg ./setup.sh