Best Practices for Securing Mobile Applications

Securing mobile applications requires a lot of security considerations. Developers should follow security best practices to create secure applications. The security measures they employ must protect their users’ personal information from eavesdropping and hacking. Before submitting an application to an app store, developers must perform thorough security checks. Hackers target public-facing applications the most, as they are designed to be compatible with any device.

Code obfuscation     

To make sure that mobile apps remain secure, it’s important to implement various security techniques, including code obfuscation and encryption. Data obfuscation involves transforming application code into a new representation. Encryption, in particular, can protect sensitive information from being stolen or reverse-engineered by malicious actors. Another method is control flow obfuscation, which involves altering the code’s flow of control and data.

This process increases the complexity of the code and makes it harder for attackers to understand it. By adding a layer of abstraction to the code, the bad actor cannot see the meaning of the data or sensitive variables. It also reduces the size of the application’s source code. By changing the names of the variables, long descriptive identifiers are replaced with shorter one-character identifiers. Furthermore, unused code is removed. Good obfuscators have many code shortening features.

File encryption

In order to ensure maximum protection for your users, you must follow best practices for file encryption when securing mobile application data. This will prevent hackers from accessing data unless they know the security key. Encryption of data stored in files is equally important as code encryption. You can implement various data encryption algorithms for your app to make it safe. Here are some of the best practices to implement when securing your mobile application data.

Always use a trusted platform-specific file encryption API. This will ensure that only a trusted source is responsible for decrypting data. Then, store secret keys only on the server side. This is much safer than storing the keys in the app itself. Moreover, you must also limit access to the keys to only those users that need to access data. For example, if your application allows users to delete files, the user should be notified to prevent them from doing so.

Detecting loopholes in the system

Detecting loopholes in the mobile app security system is difficult. Most communication between mobile applications and users takes place through a server. This component stores and processes the application data, and allows communication. Hence, the security of the application is highly dependent on the server component. Moreover, attackers may even try to compromise the application’s security by deploying malicious code within legitimate installer files and folders.

Using third-party libraries

Using third-party libraries to make your mobile applications more secure can be a great way to reduce your coding time and make the development process go more smoothly. But beware of using these libraries at the expense of security. In one study, more than three-quarters of paid Android and iOS apps contained risky functionality. And third-party libraries add another source of vulnerabilities.

To make your mobile application development more secure, it’s vital to use well-known, trusted third-party libraries. A widely used library is likely to have a reliable author, but beware of libraries that don’t have proper security measures in place. Check the documentation carefully, and verify if the library has a security system. An authentic library will have well-written documentation, and its code has been double-checked for security.