Frida Dynamic Instrumentation Toolkit

Frida is a free open-source dynamic instrumentation toolkit for developers, reverse engineers, and security researchers created and supported by NowSecure researchers.

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Dynamic Instrumentation Toolkit for Mobile Apps

Frida is often used to understand the internal behavior and network communications of mobile apps in use cases ranging from security research to debugging production code.

The Support Behind Frida

Frida was created by NowSecure Researcher Ole André V. Ravnås and is supported by a wide community of tool makers and security researchers. NowSecure researchers support the Frida community and its ongoing mission. Learn more about Ole André and the history of Frida here and follow @oleavr and the Frida project on Twitter. Access the Frida GitHub Repo. In 2017, Frida and Radare were integrated as R2Frida to get the best of both, learn more here.

Frida Powers Testing for Mobile Apps

Simply put, Frida lets you inject snippets of JavaScript or your own library into native apps on Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, iOS, Android, FreeBSD, and QNX.

Inside Frida

The Frida core is written in C and gets injected along with JavaScript into the target processes, where your JS gets executed with full access to memory, hooking functions and calling native functions. It enables a bi-directional communication channel that is used between your app and the JS running. Using Python and JS allows for quick development with a risk-free API. Frida can help catch errors in JS and provide an exception rather than crashing, and can use Python, C, Node.js, Swift, .NET, Qml, and more. Frida can run in 3 modes: Injected, the most common approach, Embedded and Preloaded through Frida’s Gadget, a shared library meant to be loaded by programs.

Frida Powers NowSecure Solutions

Frida and r2Frida are leveraged across the NowSecure Solution portfolio as part of our blackbox testing capabilities. Frida is used in NowSecure Platform for continuous security testing, NowSecure Workstation for pen tester toolkit, and NowSecure Pen Testing Services, available on demand or through Pen Testing as a Service (PTaaS), for deep expert mobile app analysis.

NowSecure and Frida For Mobile

NowSecure provides support for the Frida community and a suite of testing tools that incorporate Frida and r2Frida to support any mobile app security testing program. Frida is an open source option for security professionals interested in testing mobile apps (and other kinds of app binaries) and NowSecure offers enterprise-ready options for more mature mobile appsec programs.

Frida for iOS App Analysis

Frida supports both jailed and jailbroken operational modes on iOS mobile apps. Jailbroken is the most powerful setup, enabling you to instrument system services and apps with very little effort. Jailed testing is enabled for iOS 13 and later using debuggable mobile app builds, injecting the Frida gadget automatically when launching the mobile app. Learn more about frida on iOS here.

Frida for Android App Analysis

Frida is most commonly used on rooted Android devices for Android mobile apps. It is technically also possible to use Frida without rooting the device as long as the app is debuggable by using frida-gadget. Frida supports all Android 4.4 and later and is recommended to use Pixel or Nexus devices. Learn more about Frida on Android here.

Frida on NowSecure Academy

NowSecure Academy is a completely free upskilling platform where development teams can learn the best practices for writing secure code from the start and security teams can learn how to efficiently and effectively test mobile apps for security issues. Frida is featured in three free courses, The Frida Handbook, Cracking Fun with Frida & Radare, and iOS Reverse Engineering with Frida.

More Frida Resources

Looking to learn more about Frida? Get started here with the quickstart guide. Frida supports many languages and tools with installation guides and documentation is available with tutorials, examples, Frida tools, best practices, and more. Keep up with the latest news from Frida and new releases!