What are the Key Components of a Comprehensive Mobile App Defense?

These days, mobile applications play a key role in our day to day lives – from making payments to receiving medical treatments. The threats against mobile apps as we become more reliant on them have become more and more advanced. For organizations that are developing and deploying mobile apps, an intensive strategy for mobile app defense is no longer a choice, it’s mandatory. This article discusses some of the most important aspects of a mobile app defense framework that would be strong, covering the unique spectrum of the mobile ecosystem and providing actionable tips to organizations to secure its mobile assets.

Understanding the Mobile Threat Landscape

The mobile threat landscape continues to evolve, with the attackers’ strategies becoming more and more complex to compromise applications. As compared to traditional desktop applications, mobile apps have a unique bunch of problems. They work in different environments and in different operating systems on devices with varying security posture. In addition, mobile apps are frequently obtained by customers from app stores, where they are unknowingly exposed to the trust challenge of their security and thus become an appealing target to malicious actors.

Common dangers include reverse engineering, tampering with code, data leakage, insecure communication, and malware injection. These threats take on special significance because mobile apps often contain sensitive information such as personal information, financial information and corporate secrets. A thorough mobile app defense strategy should face these threats with layers of protection.

Secure Development Practices

Secure development practices constitute the root for mobile app defense. Applying security from the inception of a product will exclude vulnerabilities from being entered in the first instance saving cost and effort required to fix them in the future.

There should be secure coding guidelines that should be adhered to such as input validation, proper error handling and secure storage of data. Developers should be trained to know and prevent the most commonly occurring security loopholes for mobile platforms. There should be regular code reviews as well as static analysis to check for vulnerabilities prior to bringing them into production.

There should be clear SLR’s that track security requirements during the development lifecycle. Part of this is design at looking at security implications or testing for security in quality assurance. Organizations can develop security into the very applications they build if they incorporate security throughout the development lifecycle.

Code Protection and Anti-Tampering Measures

Upon deployment of an application, it becomes reverse engineered and tampered with. Attackers can use the code to get some sensitive information or, identify vulnerabilities or even alter the behavior of the application. Going by a comprehensive mobile app defense strategy there should be measures to ensure the code is protected and tampering is stopped.

The code obfuscation techniques are able to complicate the task for attackers to understand the application logic by changing the code into the form, which is harder to read and analyze. Though not a perfect solution obfuscation will increase the difficulty of attackers and will encourage casual attempts at reverse engineering.

Application code or resource modifications can be detected and in response to such modifications, anti–tampering measures can be implemented. Such limitations may include integrity checks, checksum checking, runtime environment checks. When tampering is detected the application can act to shut down, alert the administrators, or otherwise limit functionality.

Robust Authentication and Authorization

Authentication and authorization both are vital lines of defense to any mobile application. Strong authentication mechanisms prohibit impostors from use while proper authorization controls restrict user’s access to the data and capabilities that belong to him or her.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) puts up one more barrier of security which requires users to authenticate themselves in more than one-way before they can log in. This can be something the user knows ( password ), something the user has ( mobile device ) and something the user owns (biometric data).

Biometric authentication modes like fingerprinting or facial recognition ensure easy yet secure authentication concept on mobile devices. Still, it is important that biometric data remain secure, and also that fallback mechanisms are secure.

To follow the principle of least privilege authorization should be implemented so that users of the application and all its components have only the least permissions needed to perform their roles. This restricts the possible damage if a user account or component of the particular system is seized.

Secure Data Storage and Transmission

Sensitive data that requires protection whether at rest or when in transit is often the type of data that is worked with in mobile apps. Mobile app defense strategy must involve data security strategies all through the lifecycle of data.

Data at rest should be secured by strong encryption where the encryption keys is well taken care off. Sensitive data must not be stored in easy accessible places such as shared preferences or unencrypted databases or the devices external storage. Where possible the sensitive data should be stored on secured servers rather than in the device itself.

Regular Security Testing & Vulnerability Management (STVM)

Malicious vulnerabilities can exist (in spite of best practices of development and of security controls) in mobile applications. Regular security tests are necessary in order to identify and patch these weaknesses prior to exploitation.

Automated tools do not recognize the vulnerabilities that can be found through penetration testing issued by experienced security professionals. This includes Business logic flaws and authentication bypasses and numerous security flaws.

Since use of automated security scanning tools can be incorporated into the pipeline of development one can have continuous testing of the security. These tools can easily detect standard vulnerabilities including insecure storage of data, poor encryption, and poor communications.

Conclusion

The overall strategy for a mobile app defense should be multi-layered and take care of the security during the lifecycle of application. Ranging from secure development practices to runtime protection, each aspect is important for mobile application to overcome the complex application threats.Such organizations that are leading the way in provision of advanced mobile app defense solutions for businesses across the United States are such organizations as Doverunner. Doverunner is specialized in offering end to end mobile security services to help companies identify vulnerabilities, install strong protection and maintain the security posture over time. Their wealth of knowledge in defending their mobile app has positioned them as a trusted partner for organizations that need security of their mobile assets from the changing threats out there.