Common Mobile Application Vulnerabilities & How to Tackle them with Testing Tacts!

It is not surprising that we are living in a world where mornings are not energized by a drinking cup of tea but by seeing the messenger apps.

On one side, the mobile apps are overtaking our lives by providing us an ease to purchase the goods & services with a few taps. On the other hand, it gives open access to the hackers for stealing the app information and tracking the user’s records without alerting the business owners.

According to us, the application which provides the security from the front-end is safe to use, but in reality, behind the application, there are a lot of shoddy codes and misconfigured data that provide a safe room to the hackers for performing the cybercrime.

If you are the person who is planning to develop the mobile application from the web development companies, you should never skip the information that is provided in the blog. Here, we have summarized the common mobile application vulnerabilities along with the solutions that will help you to know why they should prioritize the security before setting up the business online.

Inadequate Transport Layer Implementation

The sensitive information like passwords , credit card numbers is detected by the attackers when the mobile developers do not include any safety protocols in the application. For example, - To gain network protection, there are mainly two types of cryptographic protocols required, such as TLS and SSL. In which the term ‘TLS’ refers to transport layer security, and SSL means the secure socket layer. The transport security layer provides the route in which the encrypted data is sent with the help of the client and server. However, the SSL is also used to maintain the privacy between the web browsers and servers, but it doesn’t supply many benefits like TSL.

To prevent the transaction reports and messages, it is vital to use the non-expiry and fully updated versions of TLS and SSL. It would be better for you to hire a proficient engineer who is not only in placing these certificates inside the app but also is capable of performing certain authentication checks with mobile app automation testing tools. The automated authentication techniques can entirely aid you to protect all the app stuff from the cyber-terrorists.

Improper Session Management

The improper session expiration is one of the biggest security flaws that enable the attackers to reuse the old session IDs for opening the accounts again. This issue happens with most e-commerce mobile applications because it includes the more extended time-out session codes that never let the page expire quickly.

The session Ids will never be exposed to the attackers if the mobile app testers set the proper time-out functioning in the app. They should provide the universally unique identifier each time for making the new requests each time.

Here are some points for the session management:

• Do not display the session ID in the URL.
• The credentials of user authentication should be guarded with the encryption.
• The authentication tokens should be disabled after logout.
• The session IDs should be reconstructed after making the successful login in the device.
• They should never pass the parameters like passwords, session IDs via encrypted connections.

Unprotected Binary Codes/Reverse Engineering

Binary coding is the cornerstone of the mobile application that makes it easier for the fraudsters to create the duplicate product after analyzing the design and the working of the application. If you want to preserve the binary files from the wrongdoers, you should always demand the copyright protection or registered trademarks from the web development companies before getting the readymade application in your hands.

In addition, the ASCII copyright notice alerts the people that the program is legally protected and is not suitable for hacking use. Other than that, the pinning of certificates, debugger detection, checksum controlling operations should be performed by the app engineers to keep the overriding algorithms free from malicious attacks.

Client-side Injection

The client-side injection can be an HTML injection or Javascript injection. It is another severe action implemented by the intruders. The malicious code from the client-side is executed when the URL of the application incorporates the value in the URL without sanitization. Due to this vulnerability, the app accepts the untrusted inputs and allows them to make the redirection on other pages.

The app testers should carefully examine the forms and never allow the untrusted users while making the registration in the apps. The online mobile package should be designed according to the cloud environment, or there must be a need for cloud-based testing to keep sensitive information safe from the leakage.

Conclusion

According to the research, the Android applications produce the high-risks in comparison to the iOS mobile applications. Though the users of Android do not receive the necessary updates from the merchants, and even they only use the older versions of the operating systems instead of the latest ones. For these reasons, 97% of the malware occurs in Android devices. Moreover, the monetization of personal data is possible with google services a lot because it does not use proper encryption by default.

After grabbing the information, it is clearly understood that safe key storage, encryption, obfuscate codes, and the right input validations are some of the factors that can drive the maximum protection for the mobile applications. It is possible when the consumer will choose the skillful mobile development companies because only they can help you to get the full-service internet security suite.