Is Your Mobile Application Secure Enough?

The mobile applications market is flooded with a variety of applications supporting various platforms. There are different OS available for the mobile phones with different versions which are supporting a number of devices. The mobile phone OS giants like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have provided a specific market place for the mobile applications developers to buy and sell their applications. It has also been observed that the internet data transferring is shifting to mobile devices at a very faster rate. A large number of people have adopted mobile devices today thereby increasing the competition in the mobile world.

It has been observed that due to the rising competition in the market every single software development company wants to come out with their application first in the market. Due to this scenario and tight schedules to develop an application it has been often seen that the security issues of an application are either ignored or compromised. Due to this when applications in the Apple’s app store and Android’s market were analyzed they were found to be weak at providing secure operations. There are some common pitfalls which every developer should adhere to.

Rich client side business logic can often lead to unexpected security pitfalls. An application which allows direct access to the user gives a smooth and fast user experience whereas inclusion of authentication, session timeout or any such feature can lead to a number of security pitfalls. An attacker can easily bypass the security controls by altering the response from the server. The memory capacity of mobile devices these days is very large. The applications often store the information in cache in clear text to avoid the repeated encrypting and decrypting of the data. The above defined way of development may provide ease of access to the application but it can lead to a number of security concerns.
A software development company which is developing mobile applications for big platforms can often find security threats posing to them. This is due to the reason that the OS of these devices can be easily jailbroken allowing the root access to the phone’s sensitive data. This root access to the phone’s data can often be used by the malicious attackers to perform data theft. The attacker can easily extract the data from the phone through themobile applications sandbox. Thus there are many mobile applications which are often found to be failing at being secure. There are a number of interactive mobile games also which account to this security threat.

Many of the mobile applications are found to be using poor cryptography methods. It is very important to encrypt the sensitive data when storing it on a mobile device. The iOS provides a data protection API which encrypts the data using key generated from user’s password whereas on the other hand Android provides API’s for primitive cryptographies for the mobile applications developers. If you are totally relying on the client side data validation then it may cause a serious security threat for you which will eventually lead to instability of your application. Mobile applications developers should always timeout the mobile client application when it is not being used for a certain period of time.