Mobile App Security: Best Practices and Techniques
Building an intuitive and responsive application is essential, but it’s not enough to make it popular. With mobile applications becoming integral to every business’s success, ensuring their security means securing businesses from the threats online solutions face today.
Knowing the best practices and techniques to secure mobile applications is crucial for developers and businesses. In this article, we are going to share some of the best methods to secure mobile applications and prevent unauthorized access and theft.
Must Read: Mobile App KPIs: Top 12 Metrics to Measure App Performance
Best Ways to Ensure Mobile App Security
Around 50% of the mobile applications available on Google Play Store have a security flaw, and up to 10 million applications are available on the Play Store. Addressing these flaws is essential to assure the end-users and general audience.
-
Source Code Encryption
Encrypting the source code will prevent hackers and attackers from accessing the source code and modifying it for their benefit. Disrupting the source code, they can reverse engineer the attacks and exploit security issues and loopholes.
A significant amount of security issues arise in the application’s source code. Hence, when you encrypt the source code of the application, it will make the code unreadable for unauthorized parties. As a result, they cannot damage the code scripts, leave a bug, or exploit a security loophole to insert a virus, etc.
Moreover, developers are also recommended to sign the source code. Developers use code signing certificates to digitally sign the source code, which ensures the end-users that the code has not been tampered with, modified, or changed in any form.
-
User Authentication
The majority of user-generated content comes from mobile applications. This content and the applications are used for sharing comments and other forms of communication. Using social engineering attacks, anti-social elements, and hackers can gain access to these applications.
A better way to prevent this is to have a user-authentication system in place. Deploy multi-factor authentication and add multiple layers of security to the application. Once hackers gain access to the user accounts, they can inject malicious components into the application.
One example is when users have to provide an OTP to validate their identity. Plus, ensuring mobile security compliance that aligns with the application’s systems is also a good strategy to enhance security.
-
Conduct Comprehensive Security Checks
A good practice for developers and development companies is to run a thorough check of the application and its code base before launching. Moreover, check the application for functionality and usability while ensuring it satisfies all the security checks and tests.
The security tests required for a comprehensive analysis include;
- Dynamic Application security testing
- Compliance with Industry Standards
- Network Security Measures
- Black Box Testing
- Compatibility Testing
In addition to running these tests, the security team must run pen tests regularly before and after the application is launched. Pen tests help detect and fix bugs, ensuring your application is always secure.
In this, you can take the following steps;
- Regularly conduct code audits and tests, with a specific focus on the application’s authentication and authorization procedure.
- Double-check the application’s access control sequences and work to detect any data security risks and issues.
- With the help of emulators, check how the application will perform in a simulated and controlled environment.
Don’t run all the security checks once, but conduct the security checks and tests regularly to find any sort of potential issues. If required, you can hire an application security specialist or penetration testing professionals to ensure that your data and application are well protected.
-
Database Encryption and App File Security
Applications collect and store significant amounts of unstructured data in the local file system, which can be threatening to the application and its user base. Hence, these files and the entire database must be encrypted well enough to protect the applications from getting hacked. Attackers can use the sandbox environment to access the files, posing a risk to the application users.
To protect your application and its users, you can do the following;
- Encrypt data and implement mobile app security through SQLite Database Encryption Modules.
- Use file-level encryption for all types of files across different platforms.
It’s also important to encrypt all types of files and data before transferring them to the server. For encryption, always use the latest cryptographic techniques and technologies and perform penetration tests.
-
API Strategy in Accordance with Security
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) connect applications, components of an application, cloud spaces, and users. Content and data related to an application can easily flow through APIs to complete the requisite function. Attackers can exploit the weaknesses of the API security, which makes securing APIs even more important for mobile and application security.
In this, if your application is using a third-party API, then you are basically relying on their capability and security structure to secure your application. To ensure security, use a gateway to protect APIs and integrate the Central OAuth server for higher safety. This will handle processes like user authentication, which is programmed through a client information database.
-
Securing Data in Transit
Attackers and hackers can easily interrupt HTTP communication to extract and steal data or information. Hence, securing this data while in transmission is important;
- Using Transport Layer Security (TLS) encrypts data sent or received over the internet. This way you can prevent eavesdroppers and hackers won’t be able to see what type of data is transmitted.
- Certificate Pinning builds a protection layer against remote man-in-the-middle attacks. Plus, it can also check for compromised certificate authorities and any invalid issuance of certificate. Certificate pinning checks the details of the digital certificate with the corresponding domain name.
In addition to taking these two measures, also check your application’s needs, data sensitivity, and potential security issues.
-
Backend Security for Mobile Applications
An application’s backend is the repository of huge amounts of data. No business owner would want an attacker or hacker to get their hands on this data. This is the data at rest, which needs encryption. Encrypting this data ensures that attackers cannot read the data, even when they have got access to the same.
Plus, verify the API support system connected to the mobile operating system. In collaboration with high-level authentication, backend security systems can protect the application from unwanted user access.
-
User Empowerment
The last step in protecting the application, userbase, and application data is to empower users and instruct them to take certain measures. Teach or train them to be aware and cautious when browsing the web, using an application, and interacting with the application components.
Moreover, teaches users to safeguard and protect their data while educating them on the ways and methods to do the same. Some tips you can share with your users include;
- Downloading applications only from trusted sources, like Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
- Set a strong password for all the accounts.
- Enable app-lock settings for all the data-sensitive applications on your phone.
- Enable auto-logout feature in sensitive applications.
- Don’t share passwords, OTP, and other information with anyone.
Conclusion
Building an application is a comprehensive process. Where it is essential to have an impressive design and an army of relevant features, making the application secure is also essential. An application’s security measures must begin right from the coding part and end with sharing the security tips with the user base. At Mobmaxime, we pay importance to the application’s security and take help from in-house mobile app security experts to create secure and safe applications for our clients and their users.
Get in touch with us today to know more about how we can build a highly secure and safe mobile application for you.
Join 10,000 subscribers!
Join Our subscriber’s list and trends, especially on mobile apps development.I hereby agree to receive newsletters from Mobmaxime and acknowledge company's Privacy Policy.