Critical Mobile Security Tips For App Developers
Mobile app security is a crucial necessity to protect your brand image and help users to engage with the app. Since a single security breach can put your business brand at risk costing millions of dollars and a lifetime of customer trust, you cannot have a lenient approach regarding this. With the abundance of applications and increased competition in the market, mobile app security becomes important to stay ahead in the game. This is why for app developers it is always a top priority just when they start building the app.
How can app developers ensure optimum security for their apps? Are there any tried and tested ways to improve app security? Well, here we provide some really useful tips to strengthen app security.
Analyse the risks and vulnerabilities
In order to have a clear picture corresponding to the security threats and vulnerabilities for their app projects, app developers need to analyse the common risks and create risk aversion models. Here below we mention some key areas that they need to focus upon.
- Data breaches and data leaks: Does the app have robust and solid firewalls that can be easily breached to access critical data? This requires rigorous penetration testing and evaluating the effectiveness of the firewall.
- Flawed backend communication: Another key area that needs to be constantly monitored is the communication between the app and the backend services including sharing third-party APIs. This requires robust server-level security and secure API integration.
- App-level protocols to prevent frauds: The mobile apps allowing financial transactions are most vulnerable to frauds and scams. This requires strong app-level protocols to secure authentication, transaction and data. Analyse how strong this security measure is for your app.
- Regulations and compliance: You also need to analyse whether the app follows all the industry-specific guidelines and compliance standards such as General Data Protection Regulation, Revised Payment Services Directive, etc.
Encrypting the App’s Source Code
Since the majority of the native app code remains on the client-side, they are more exposed to malware attacks and other critical security vulnerabilities. Attackers mostly find code vulnerabilities through reverse-engineering techniques and hence it is important to encrypt the source code. By encrypting the source code of the app developers to a great extent can completely prevent attacks from harming your app.
Get rid of flaws in code
Many apps simply become e poised for security risks because of the unclean and unorganized code. Coding flaws carry with them a whole array of risks corresponding to data security. The crucial aspect here is to write clean, precise and low footprint code that doesn’t leave much room for the attackers to penetrate and manipulate.
To optimise the code first of all it is important to get rid of all unused code and irrelevant spaces within the code script. Secondly, it is important to use libraries that clearly show the coding errors. Lastly, make sure that the developers follow best coding practices and the project uses a concurrent code testing approach.
Robust Penetration Tests
Penetration testing is crucial to evaluate how vulnerable the app is against security threats. There is a continuous requirement to test an app against continuously evolving security risks before the deployment of the app. This is where penetration testing can be highly effective in averting security risks and threats. Penetration tests lay bare all the security loopholes that can be manipulated by the attackers to break through the security layer.
Give more attention to libraries
An app project often needs to rely on third-party libraries. But when using them it is important to be extremely careful about the security risks. It is advisable to test the code of the library thoroughly before using the library in the app project. Some libraries already have a bad reputation for their security flaws and should be avoided straight away.
Only use validated APIs
There are many APIs that have not been validated and come with loose code to incorporate security flaws in an app. These APIs are often manipulated by hackers and attackers to steal authentication data and make security breaches. This is why well-validated and authorised APIs should only be used in-app projects.
Give attention to a Backend security
Since most of the mobile apps come with the usual mechanism of client-side and server-side communication, having robust backend security is crucial for app projects. In order to ensure maximum security for the application backend, you need to make sure that the APIs for server-side communication comes with a proper authentication and data transport mechanism that suits your app project and target platform.
Reduce storing of sensitive app data
In order to make data more accessible, many app projects store sensitive data within the local memory of the device. This augments the security vulnerabilities or exposure of the sensitive app data to unwanted risks. To prevent storing sensitive data locally in the device it is always advisable to use encrypted containers or key chains. You can further reduce data exposure. To the device environments by reducing the log data with automatic and periodic deletion of data from time to time.
Apply Session Logout Protocol
It is common for app users to forget to log out of an app. When they switch to another app or just move away. The opened app screen can expose sensitive financial and other data to security threats. To
prevent this the app should enforce automatic logout for inactive app sessions after a certain time. This practise is already common with banking and most other financial apps.
Conclusion
All the critical security measures corresponding to security flaws we mentioned above are not inexhaustible and there are still several others that equally need a place here. By incorporating sufficient practices to overcome security breaches, it is possible to reduce common security flaws to a large extent. But the running thread among all these tips is about preventing third-party vulnerabilities and using best coding as well as development practices that have been tested and tried in successful app projects.
