Extract and Decode IPA File

For a lot of the information gathering, and static analysis of the mobile app, we need to first extract the IPA file. The IPA file is nothing more than a zip file which means we can extract it with existing tools on the macOS/Linux systems.

To extract the IPA file:

/usr/bin/unzip -qq -d App filename.ipa

This will extract the IPA to the App directory. The structure will be something like the following:

├── App
│   └── Payload
│       └── Example.app
│           ├── _CodeSignature
│           │   └── CodeResources
│           ├── AppIcon60x60@2x.png
│           ├── AppIcon76x76@2x~ipad.png
│           ├── Assets.car
│           ├── Binary
│           ├── embedded.mobileprovision
│           ├── Info.plist
│           └── PkgInfo