How To Ensure Security for Your Mobile Apps

Usage of mobile apps has increased exponentially with each passing year. The huge growth of internet-connected mobile devices has enhanced the usage of the internet as a whole globally. Usually mobile apps are available via online app distributors—Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Windows Store, etc. Mobile apps are also regarded as a strong form to deliver value and content for smartphone users all over the world. The importance of mobile apps is deeply felt by global enterprises and organizations with respect to improving business functionalities and maintaining a connected and energetic workforce.

Mobile App Security Has Become the Need of the Hour

It has been seen that the majority of the smartphone users do not pay much attention to making their mobile apps secure. As a result, many of the times frequently used apps become prone to malicious intents or hacking.

Some statistics given below can reflect the grave nature of mobile apps being hacked:

• Among top 100 paid apps in the Apple App Store, 56% of them have been hacked
• The number of malicious threats in the mobile devices increases by a whopping 163% year after year
• Large portions of the top paid apps in the Google Play Store have been hacked to date

Cracked and hacked mobile apps are responsible for:

• Major loss of revenue
• Intellectual property theft
• Damage of brand image
• Unauthorized access to confidential data and information

In order to prevent your mobile from getting exposed to digital threats and attacks, there are few necessary mobile app security tips which you can follow.

You should consult a mobile app development company to know about all possible security measures to ensure protection of confidential information and data.

In this blog post we will be discussing certain vital measures that can help in safeguarding your mobile apps from getting hacked.

These are as follows:

Source Code Encryption: Within the source code and design of the mobile apps, mobile malware often taps vulnerabilities and bugs. There are suggestions from recent reports that malicious codes can impact more than 12 million mobile devices at any given point of time. Hackers mainly do their part by repackaging popular apps into rogue apps and then publishing them.

Here you need source code encryption. Source code encryption is one of the crucial mobile app security tips that can protect it from getting infected. For example, JavaScript, which is easy to read, can be made obscure by obfuscation and minification.

Creating Provisions for Data Security: Unstructured information often gets stored within the storage of a device when a mobile app accesses confidential or enterprise data. This is another mobile app security tip which helps in effectively using mobile data encryption to protect it in a sandbox. This can be smoothly done by offering file-level encryption across multiple operating systems or by using SQLite database encryption modules.

Securing Data-in-Transit: The data which is sent to the backend servers from the client contains sensitive information which needs to be protected for ensuring zero data theft and privacy leaks. Developers can ensure data protection easily by employing support for SSL tunnels or VPN.

Backend Security: Backend servers need strong security measures to get protected against malicious attacks. In order to provide security to the backend servers, you have to ensure that all APIs are verified depending upon the mobile platform you choose to code for. This is because API authentication and transport mechanisms may vary from one platform to the other.

Preventing Unintended Data Leakage: While interacting with apps, there are certain permissions to seek which help business enterprises to avail relevant personal information. By using secured analytics and ethically implementing advertising, user data can be prevented from getting leaked unintentionally to malicious business vendors or hackers.

Performing Security and QA Checks: This is no less a valuable security tip which helps in testing apps against randomly generated security scenarios. IT giants like Microsoft and Google hold hackathons where hundreds of hackers look out for options to devise security measures.

Using Latest Cryptography Techniques: Some noteworthy cryptography algorithms like SHA1 and MD5 have already become insufficient to provide modern security. Hence, it is always advisable to remain updated with the latest technology in security algorithms. So by using modern encryption methods such as SHA-256 for hashing and AES with 256-bit encryption, you can make apps strong enough from getting affected by malicious threats. By performing threat modelling and manual penetration testing, you can ensure foolproof security for your apps.

Conclusion: Thus, from the above discussion, you can now have a strong idea about mobile app security. Mobile app security tips help in providing strong safety measures so that external threats cannot hamper the authenticity of the apps. For any app development company, it is very important to consider the security aspects so that the apps can be used seamlessly.