Best Practices for Mobile App Security

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By Chintan Mehta

April 21, 2017

The use of mobile is increasing by leaps and bounds and our lives right now are entwined with the mobile gadgets like never before. Almost each and every part of people’s everyday life is connected with some mobile phone device or other. We all keep a large amount of personal data stored on our iPhones, iPads and Smartphones without even thinking once about the security of data. We often exchange some of our information just to enjoy free services from Google. But before doing this, do we ever think about the hackers who are keeping an eye on our personal data?

In this era of digitalization when technology is so advanced, we can’t even imagine that our personal data can be hacked or stolen in a fraction of seconds.

A recent research by Arxan states that around 73% of the most popular apps on Google Play store had been hacked. Around 56% of paid iOS apps and 53% of free iOS apps had been hacked on Apple store.

Tips for Mobile App Security

As the numbers above show an alarming situation, there are few security breaches that an app developer should keep in mind to think about keeping their mobile apps secure. You can follow these top while developing your mobile applications.

Secure Passwords: Passwords should be a mandate for all the users’ in order to provide high security to your mobile application. The password needs to have minimum complexity requirements- it should contain at least one character and combination of uppercase and lowercase letters. This improves the security of mobile app.
App Data Access Permission: While installing mobile app, it asks the user permission to access some of your data such as files, contacts, hardware etc. So, while developing mobile app, ensure that you ask only the relevant information which is vital for your app. Requesting access to sensitive information may scare your users and they might hesitate to provide data in future.
Good Mobile Encryption Policy: Data needs to be encrypted at each and every step- be it communication between app, any web services and backend server. Mobile apps handling private data should support end-to-end encryption.
Updated Mobile Operating System: Companies should keep all the mobile operating systems up-to-date as the updated version always involve new security patches with some new features.
Safe and Secure API: APIs flow a large amount of data between applications, cloud and users, all of whom needs to be verified and authorized to access that data. So, it is very necessary to build a safe and secure API.
Bug Testing for App: App code should be tested in order to detect the vulnerabilities in the code that can be corrected before publishing the app out in the market.
Disallow sideloading: Sideloaded apps do not undergo the normal security checks performed by the native stores. So users should be restricted from using sideloaded apps. A hacker can easily steal sensitive information of the consumers from such apps.

Takeaways

There are millions of companies developing mobile applications across the world. So in order to stand out from the crowd, it is very necessary to develop a secure app. Mobile app development companies should train their developers so that they can provide high security to the mobile apps and can protect critical data of users from hacker attacks.