public-twitter

[nirgn975]

---
layout: "../../../layouts/BlogPost.astro"
title: "Make Twitter Public Again!"
pubDate: 2022-12-01T09:00:00+03:00
draft: false
author: "Nir Galon"
authorLink: "/about"

tags: ["reverse engineering", "frida", "hacking", "white hat", "pentest", "android"]
category: "reverse engineering"

featuredImage: "/posts/2022/public-twitter/cover.webp"
---

Everybody talk about Twitter those days, so I would do it too. I love browsing Twitter and if you don't know - you can do it without being registered, just go to [twitter.com](https://twitter.com) and you have a search bar at the top and _"Explore"_ button in the left menu, you can search posts, browse hashtags, go to users profiles and see their info, tweets, media, following, followers - everything. Twitter is public and they're not hiding it.

But what if you go to their mobile app? I downloaded their mobile app to my Android device and presnted with a login/signup screen without a way to go around it. So I thought to myself, if their viewing API is public on the web, maybe it's open on mobile too and I just need to (somehow) go past that login/signup screen. But how would I do that?

Enter [Frida](https://frida.re)! Frida is a _*Dynamic instrumentation toolkit for developers, reverse-engineers, and security researchers*_ by it's own definition, but in a simple language it's just a tool that lets you inject snippets of JavaScript into native apps on Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, iOS, Android, and QNX.

![Frida Toolkit](/posts/2022/public-twitter/frida-toolkit.webp "Frida Toolkit")

 

## 1. The Plan

Another great tool that we'll need to install on our local machine is [Android Studio](https://developer.android.com/studio), this is an IDE that used by Android app developers to develop their apps, it comes with an Android Virtual Device (AVD) to test and see the app while developing it, and we'll use it to run the Twitter app and Frida.

The last thing we need is the actual Twitter app, you can download the Twitter [apk](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apk_(file_format)>) from [here](https://apkmirror.com).

### 1.1. AVD

I'll not go over the installtion part of Android Studio and how to create an AVD, just search Google for it, there are plenty of tutorials about it. Once you have your AVD up and running on your local machine, and the Twitter apk, you can check that your virtual device is up and you can interact with it through [adb](https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/adb) with the `adb devices` command, and then install the apk with the `install` command.

```bash title=" " showLineNumbers
adb install ~/Downloads/com.twitter.android_9.65.3-release.0-29653000_minAPI21\(arm64-v8a,armeabi-v7a,x86,x86_64\)\(nodpi\)_apkmirror.com.apk

This is how it'll look if it all went successfully

And then you'll see the Twitter app on your virtual device

 

1.2. Frida

Before we continue, let's talk a bit about Frida. In our case, Frida is splits into 2 parts: the frida-tools which is a Python package that offers some CLI tools that can be used for quick instrumentation, and the frida-server which is just a daemon that exposes frida-core over TCP (listening on localhost:27042 by default) and accepts injection commands. This allows Frida to connect via ADB/USB debugging to our device.

So the first step is to install frida-tools on your local machine, which you can do with pip (package installer for Python)

pip install frida-tools

To check that frida was installed and everything is working as expected you can write frida-ps and see an output of all the running processes on your local machine.

Next let's download the latest frida-server from it's GitHub page here, and unzip it and extract the file inside it. Then we need to rename it to frida-server (just for convenience) and push it to the virtual device and run it as a background process

adb root
adb push frida-server /data/local/tmp/
adb shell "chmod 755 /data/local/tmp/frida-server"
adb shell "/data/local/tmp/frida-server &"

To check that frida-server is running on the virtual device and your local frdia can talk to it, run frida-ps with the U flag (for usb)

frida-ps -U

If you see all the running processes of the android device - you are good to go.

 

2. Find the hook

To know which function to hook with Frida we need to do some digging in the app code, but we don't have it's soruce code, just the compile code. So we'll use some tools to decompile the app (using dex2jar)

http://www.javadecompilers.com/ or https://www.decompiler.com/

brew install dex2jar
d2j-dex2jar -d com.twitter.android_9.65.3-release.0-29653000_minAPI21\(arm64-v8a,armeabi-v7a,x86,x86_64\)\(nodpi\)_apkmirror.com.apk

And you'll see a .jar file with the same name of the apk. Now we need to open it some software that can

 

5. Summary