There’s this new hot app everybody’s so excited about, but it’s only available for iOS and you’d love to interop with it. You realize it’s relying on encrypted network protocols and tools like Wireshark just won’t cut it. You pick up Frida and use it for API tracing.
You’re building a desktop app which has been deployed at a customer’s site.
There’s a problem but the built-in logging code just isn’t enough. You need to send your customer a custom build with lots of expensive logging code.
Then you realize you could just use Frida and build an application- specific tool that will add all the diagnostics you need, and in just a few lines of Python.
No need to send the customer a new custom build - you just send the tool which will work on many versions of your app.
You’d like to build a Wireshark on steroids with support for sniffing encrypted protocols. It could even manipulate function calls to fake network conditions that would otherwise require you to set up a test lab.
Your in-house app could use some black-box tests without polluting your production code with logic only required for exotic testing.
Why a Python API, but JavaScript debugging logic?
Frida’s core is written in C and injects QuickJS into the target processes,
where your JS gets executed with full access to memory, hooking functions and even calling native functions inside the process.
There’s a bi-directional communication channel that is used to talk between your app and the JS running inside the target process.
Using Python and JS allows for quick development with a risk-free API. Frida can help you easily catch errors in JS and provide you an exception rather than crashing.
