Mobile App Security: A brief guide for All App development companies

Nicolas Thomas
5 min readDec 3, 2019
tabris.com

When it comes to Security aspect, it becomes a bare necessity. One blunder can put your faith & reputation into questioning. This is why, It becomes a priority to get in sync with those App Development Company in India, which ensures high security standards.

It has been seen many times, when you put your best efforts to make an intuitive, innovative and exciting app, Single breach in security can put you in trouble. So, it is better to take precautions apart from taking cure.

Hence, for your better understanding, We are going to describe you about, Top Measure App Development Companies can take to avoid Mobile App Security Issues.

What Can Be the Steps to Avoid Mobile App Security Breach?

There are many indispensable ways to ensure Mobile App Security. You can utilize different methodology. To name a few, here is the list of Top Mobile App Security Features which should get implemented while making any mobile application.

HTTPS

Gfycat

HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. This confirms secure connectivity to the computer networks as well as to the Internet. The communication protocol is encrypted by Transport Layer Security (TLS). TLS and its previous generation, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) are cryptographic protocols, which ensures the privacy of data and integrity between the server and an application.

Secure Code

To get into an applicant, the attackers needs bugs and vulnerabilities if any. They reverse engineer your codes and for this, all it takes is public copy of your application. It is estimated that malicious code is impacting over 11.6 million mobile devices at any given point.

Hence it become priority that each code is written with utmost concern. The codes should have highly secured languages that holds magnificent protocols to avoid any kind of hacking. Simultaneously, you should design your code in a way where it can not be reverse engineered. Testing should be conducted frequently and bugs so obtained are fixed at the same time.

Extra Careful with Libraries

It is necessary to take extra efforts for deploying the codes onto the applications. The third party libraries should be properly testing before it gets implemented in an app. Because sometimes the path to enter in some libraries remain open and leads to unwanted threats from attackers. For an instance, GNU C Library consist of a security drop where any attacker can quickly executive malicious code and can crash a system too.

Authorized APIs

GIPHY Developers

Using APIs that are unauthorized and have some bugs allows any hacker to enter in any website or application easily. Caching authorization information locally, helps developers easily re-utilize these information when making calls. Somewhere, it becomes an opportunity for the attackers as they get the desired loopeholes, which gives them access to the app easily.

No Sensitive Data Stored on the Devices

When you are fetching data from different platforms, There comes a need of certain security keys. For instance, these keys are required when accessing Google Maps or while using other Google Services. Secret Keys are stored on the server sides and acts as the authorized login.

Where, there is no server side, It becomes a priority to save these keys within the application. Similarly, it is necessary to encrypt secret keys and limit it.

Tamper Detection Technologies

AndroidPub

There should be some alerts or technical securities, whenever, any attackers tries to manipulate your codes. Active Tamper Detection are deployed to make sure that code will not render once get reverse engineered.

Deploy Proper Session Handling

Sessions conducted by users on apps or websites lasts longer than on mobile than from Desktops. This makes session handling quite difficult for the server. Instead of device identifiers, use token to identify devices over servers. Token can be revoked any time which makes them more secure in case of lost or stolen devices.

Least Privilege

It means the app should allow single permissions. Other permissions or more are not acceptable. More functions are implemented with single or two permission. If there is no need to access mobile contacts then don’t ask for it.

Also avoid making unnecessary network connections. There are many others features which belongs to Least Privilege.

Code Obfuscation

Code Obfuscation is an intentional act of inserting machine codes that are harder for attackers to understand. A tool known as obfuscation are utilized to convert the straightforward source code into hard programmes.

Code obfuscation includes the following process which can be done manually or with the help of any tool:

Encrypting some or all of the code

● Stripping out potentially revealing metadata

● Renaming useful class and variable names to meaningless labels

● Adding unused or meaningless code to an application’s binary

Ensuring Mobile App Security

Thus in these ways, it becomes the responsibility of the developers to encrypt such codes or techniques that ensure Mobile App Security. User searches are totally shifted on mobile and desktop searches are preferred less.

Therefore technologies should be deployed for mobile users rather for desktop users. Each developer should implement such safety measures which meets up with the user expectation. Companies or indian app developers can implement the above given schemes to confirm more security features in mobile applications.

Bottom Line:

Security is the basic step in development work. With the enhancing technology and smart studies, intruders get a clear advantage when you leave some open bugs or loose codes in your applications. Codes (in any language) should be written with all safety measures. Whether these required encryption or require any obfuscation.

App developers must ensure the security parameters deployed according to the demands of users. If any app is going to be showcased to a vide ratio of audience, then security parameters must be adopted on 1 level up.

Measure can be limited if the app is going to be showcased in a limited ratio of audience. It totally depends upon the project type and developer’s skill. But Mobile Security is the basic and most important step in the development sector.

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Nicolas Thomas

My name is Nicolas Thomas. I am Managing Director and Co-Founder of Indian App Developer, a Software Development Company.