Security Measures with your mobile application development

Posted by Emma on July 17th, 2018

Understand the security risks associated with your app such as the sensitivity of any information you collect and store and the number of people using the app. All applications that access, use, or transfer individuals’ data should be tested rigorously for security purposes and comply with current security best practices. Implementing data retention policies and security measures will help ensure user data is properly safeguarded.

1. Encryption

Encrypt data in transit (e.g., use SSL/TLS) when authenticating users or transferring personal information. Your app should provide appropriate protections for user data in-transit, especially when that data is authentication data, session data, or personal information. New hacking tools have made snooping on insecure connections quite simple, especially on unsecured Wi-Fi networks. You can avoid many of these problems by using SSL/TLS for all communications with your server, as modern back-end providers should have little problem scaling SSL even to a large number of transactions.

Encrypt data you store about or on behalf of your users, especially sensitive information and passwords.

Whenever feasible, you should ensure you are encrypting your users’ data, especially authentication information like usernames, email addresses, and passwords. Storing unencrypted data puts both you and your users at risk in the event of a data breach.

2. De-Identification

Make efforts to de-identify user data before sharing it with another party. De-identified data is that which cannot be linked to a particular individual through reasonable means. This often involves scrubbing the identifiable elements of personal data, making it comparatively safe in privacy terms, while attempting to retain much of its commercial and scientific value. In its Privacy Report, the FTC provided that personal data may be considered de-identified where, “ a given data set is not reasonably identifiable; the company publicly commits not to re-identify it, and the company requires any downstream users of the data to keep it in de-identified form.”

Consider hashing device IDs. Hashing is an encryption technique that uses a cryptographic hash function that transforms data of arbitrary length to a value of a fixed length referred to as the hash value.

3. User Authentication

Make sure users can log out of a session using the mobile client and that password changes on the back-end side invalidate mobile clients’ current sessions. If your application accesses, collects, or stores sensitive data or is a fruitful target for phishing attacks, consider using two-factor authentication, such as confirmation text messages, or one-time application-specific passwords.

4. Choose Third-party Libraries Wisely:

Third-party libraries are highly popular amongst mobile app developers. They utilize the code offered in such libraries, but threats might lurk in that code. It is advisable to thoroughly test the codes taken from third-party libraries before incorporating it with your own mobile app code, since many might have malicious code lurking around

5. Deploy Tamper-detection Techniques:

Deploy techniques that minimize code tampering. It is commonly known that attackers insert malicious code into mobile apps and then automatically get the data and publish it elsewhere. There are various tamper detection and anti-tamper techniques that could be included in your mobile app coding so that you get warned when any such activity occurs, such as verifying the apps signature at runtime, identifying app installer, performing environment checks, etc

6. Use the Latest Cryptography Techniques:

Most widely used cryptographic protocols and algorithms such as MD5 and SHA1 are insufficient as per modern security standards. Therefore it is better to use state-of-the-art encryption APIs such as 256-bit AES encryption combined with SHA-256 for hashing. As a developer, you should also invest in threat modeling, penetration testing, etc.

If you would like to build Mobile app with high security measures then visit today HokuApps Mobile application development company for more details.

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Emma

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Emma
Joined: July 12th, 2018
Articles Posted: 24

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