When considering mobile app safety, we focus on identifying, analyzing, and managing risks within the software development cycle. This includes implementing technologies and practices to minimize password and data theft, hacking attempts, and application crashes.
Continuous assessment of mobile app vulnerabilities is an essential component of information security. It allows companies to find and eliminate flaws throughout the mobile app development process prior to their release.
Ideally, security analysis combines manual penetration testing and automated analysis during the development cycle. This approach provides the greatest coverage of possible application vulnerabilities.
Why is mobile app security important?
The number of mobile applications is growing rapidly. Each month, approximately 100,000 new apps appear on Google Play. As of Q3 2022, 3.55 million Android apps were available on the platform. The Apple App Store featured 1.66 million iOS apps. The user base for these products is also rapidly increasing. In 2016, mobile traffic surpassed web traffic worldwide and has since grown to reach 60%.
Every bank, store, or airline has its own mobile application for interacting with customers. Mobile access to goods and services has long become commonplace. However, mobile applications’ popularity and their deep integration into business operations provoke the growth of cybersecurity threats. Both renowned hackers and lesser-known cybercrooks frequently target these apps to obtain personal data, intercept transaction details, or crash applications.
In an effort to quickly create a product and attract more users, developers often write insecure code, inadvertently creating vulnerabilities that expose their company and customers to potential threats. Cyberattacks can prove extremely costly for businesses, causing substantial financial losses, ruining their reputation, incurring regulatory fines, and resulting in customer attrition. Studies show that 83% of apps have at least one security flaw, while 50% of mobile applications have critical vulnerabilities.
Mobile security risks are on the rise
Often, companies employ sophisticated tools and methods to assess the security of their web applications. However, when it comes to mobile apps, security testing is often restricted to occasional manual inspections. This state of affairs can be attributed to the scarcity of high-quality security analysis tools and a lack of expertise in this area.
Mobile software is significantly different from web applications and potentially more vulnerable. Unlike web development that runs within a browser sandbox, mobile apps run on a device connected to a cloud server, interact directly with the operating system and other apps, and store system information on the device.
Mobile apps present significant opportunities for hackers to launch attacks. Currently, almost one-third of applications contain vulnerabilities such as storing information in plain text, insecure information transfer, insecure authorization, the ability to send arbitrary commands to the server, security problems in open-source libraries, and sharing data with cell phone tracker apps.
Methods for identifying security flaws in mobile applications
The IT industry has developed approaches to ensure mobile application security by implementing Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST) practices. These practices have been successful in solving many problems related to application security. It includes several approaches:
- SAST: Static analysis of the application source code. It helps detect insecure configurations, looks for tokens, encryption keys, and other sensitive data, checks the correctness of the network communication configuration, etc.
- DAST: Dynamic application analysis. It detects potentially insecure network traffic and attack entry points created by both primary and third-party applications.
- API ST: Application API analysis. The analysis of forwarded messages between the application and its server is conducted to detect the presence of flaws and sensitive information.
- IAST: Interactive application analysis. It involves monitoring the flow of application data and tracking the movement of data from entry points to potentially dangerous functions to identify any security vulnerabilities.
Regular use of MAST practices for security analysis can help ensure comprehensive coverage of vulnerabilities in mobile applications. In addition to MAST practices, the industry has adopted security standards such as PCI DSS, OWASP Mobile Top 10, and CWE/SANS Top 25. Checking against these standards can help avoid common security mistakes during the application development process.
How to improve mobile app security?
Here are five basic principles that will help increase the security of the company’s mobile ecosystem.
- Regular automated analysis of mobile applications for vulnerabilities should be conducted in accordance with MAST practices. Special solutions can be utilized to integrate automatic checks into the DevOps development cycle.
- Regularly check mobile applications for compliance with information security standards, such as PCI DSS, CWE/SANS Top 25, and OWASP Mobile Top 10.
- Periodic penetration testing is recommended for manual external verification of mobile applications.
- Regular checks of released mobile applications are recommended to identify recently reported vulnerabilities, including those found in third-party components.
- Enhancing team competencies in order to create secure code during the initial stages of mobile application development should be the primary objective of specialized training programs designed for developers.