Today, mobile devices have insinuated themselves into people’s existence as ordinary appendages of everyday experiences as pictures or keys. As the world moves to app usage in their mobile phones, the vulnerability to threats such as loss of security and data piracy also rises. The OWASP mobile top 10 is the perfect list to use in identifying and mitigating the most important security threats facing mobile applications today. In this comprehensive guide, you will learn five key areas of mobile security that everyone concerned with developing, securing, or using mobile devices should know.
1. The Silent Threat: Improper Platform Usage and Data Storage Dangers
Mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android now have adequate security models as an intrinsic application platform; nevertheless, misuse of these models invites risks in the hands of attackers. Whenever the developers manipulate or neglect the platform securing mechanisms or do not handle the data properly, they open the door to hackers. Let us take an example of a banking application with credentials of an account saved in plaintext in the device’s local storage – it is as good as leaving your house keys hidden under the doormat waiting for nobody to take them.
The risk turns even higher when applications preserve information that should not be seen by others and, sometimes, use no encryption or the same key for both encryption and decryption. Picture having your important jewels in a box, which you locked, but then you took a piece of tape and stuck that key there! This is actually what occurs when such applications incorrectly apply data storage primitives. This information can be easily retrieved by attackers who have compromised a device with the use of open-source tools and methods.
2. The Hidden Vulnerabilities: Network Communication and Authentication Weaknesses
As the dependency on the internet and computing devices increases, various mobile applications are always sending and receiving data from backends, other third parties, and endpoints. These are conversational channels that when not well protected can be intercepted and manipulated. Unsecured network communication can be compared with an open letter, where anyone along the way can read its contents. The SSL/TLS encryption for the protection of data, the validation of the certificates, and the use of secure communication protocols are recommended properly.
As mentioned before, another major weakness area in mobile applications is also related to the authentication mechanisms. The primary attacks include bypassing login screens, session theft, and mimicking other users since the weak authentication systems give access to intruders. In many applications, the ‘Remember me’ feature is provided with inadequate security solutions; applications store tokens insecurely or they do not manage sessions securely. This is in equal measure as leaving a spare key at a place everyone can see – it makes life easier, but it is very insecure.
3. The Unseen Enemy: Code Injection and Reverse Engineering Risks
The software, especially mobile applications, is at a high risk from code injection attacks and reverse engineering. Code injection takes place when an attacker gains the ability to execute his/ her code in the context of your application. This can be in a process through exploited third-party libraries, poor data management and storage, or through exploitation of proper programming flaws. It is like having a stranger walk into your home and not only begin to change items around and even bring in furniture you never agreed to have there in the first place but also place the most uncomfortable spying equipment you would never dream of having in your home.
Another great threat that can be linked with reverse engineering is as follows: When applications are poorly protected from code obfuscation and tampering, the attackers can reverse engineer them to comprehend how they work, and how they can be attacked. This remains a problem, especially for applications processing sensitive data or acting as the primary business process implementer. Unfortunately, when you don’t secure your app, your application’s code is out in the open for hackers to inspect and penetrate.
4. The Privacy Predicament: Data Leakage and Access Control Issues
Many times data leakage on smartphone apps happens through what appears to be harmless interfaces – clipboard contents, screenshots, logging capabilities, or temporary files. Such interfaces might actually leak data through these channels with very little protection or otherwise. Think of an app that enables a user to snap or photocopy contents of a restricted document or an app that directly copies restricted data to the clipboard – all this information is readable by other apps, or it is retrieved from the device backups.
Permission-related problems appear when applications do not implement the respective systems or lack appropriate protection for the concerned functionality. This could mean enabling any user other than an administrator to perform administrative operations or not asking the user for the appropriate permissions before conducting a certain operation.
5. The Update Urgency: Security Configuration and Patch Management
Security setting and patch management are two of the major persistent threats when it comes to mobile application security. Applications must be made to work securely in different form factors, in different operating systems of different versions, and in different use cases. Some of them are related to security misconfigurations, allowing for instance debugging services in production builds or not properly implementing certificate pinning. It is like having a smart security system and leaving it all in simulated mode, meaning all the alarms are off.
A large number of organisations fail to apply security fixes within a reasonable period and updates and patch management are essential for sustaining application security. Incomplete updates can expose applications to known vulnerabilities and poorly implemented updates might actually let the attackers capture the updates.
Conclusion
To ensure that applications are protected against the various risks highlighted by the OWASP Mobile Top 10, it is important to fully understand the risks and the proper way to counter them. By identifying and following proper guidance on the platform usage, how to communicate securely, how to protect the code through solutions like Appsealing, what kind of privacy controls to let in, or better configuring and securing the application, organisations can strengthen their mobile application security and minimise the risks of losing the users’ data.