Mobile apps are just the thing now, isn’t it?
There is an app for everything.
But as businesses grow through these apps, there is a humongous amount of data they carry and process. So security should take a central place naturally.
Like everything in the cyberspace, even apps can be vulnerable to attacks by hackers or other forms of exploitation.
– The personal or financial information can be prone to interception and misuse.
– A malware may be imported and corrupt the entire system.
– Your app code could be tampered with or copied and reverse engineered into a fake app.
These are losses no one is ready for. Ever.
So app developers have their own ways to prevent any vulnerabilities and make the apps a safe and secure place for anyone to operate on.
According to Arxan’s 5th Annual State of Application Security Report, a combined 84 percent of mobile app users and mobile app executives believe that their mobile health and finance apps are “adequately secure,” and 63 percent believe that app providers are doing “everything they can” to protect their mobile health and finance apps.
Yet over 90% of the apps tested had 2 out of 10 OWSAP Mobile Top 10 Risks.
While you choose your app development company, in UK or Singapore or any corner of the world, there are some questions you should ask them when they take your project so that the security of your and your users’ data is not compromised.
1. How secure is the app code?
The code needs to be adequately encrypted as to not allow malicious access into it. As told earlier, anyone with access to it can not only temper with it, affecting users but also one can revere engineer it to create a spoof of your app and use it to fool anyone.
2. What is the API security strategy?
All apps make intensive use of APIs to enable a smoother flow of data from and to the app server. That means servers that the API’s of the app are accessing (your own, or third-party) should ideally have strict security measures prevent unauthorized access and also protect data.
APIs and those accessing them should be verified to prevent any interception of sensitive information passing from the client back to the server and database.
3. How good is the encryption?
Irrespective of the app being a native, web or a hybrid one, you will always need the data on it to be encrypted well. When data resided on to a device, be it temporarily or permanently, it makes it vulnerable.
Thus, app developers should ensure that sensitive user data like passwords, bank details, etc. aren’t stored directly on a device. If they are stored then they should be in a highly encrypted storage.
The algorithm should be strong and the keys should be well managed.
Do they provide file-level encryption too?
4. How intensively are the security measures going to be tested?
In the rush to bring apps to the market, critical security measures are left untested by a lot of app development companies.
You should make sure that the app developers you hire are testing and retesting the code to ensure all authentication and authorization measures work fine and there are no data security issues. They should undertake penetration testing.
The users are looking forward to your app to make your product/service more accessible to them but if they see their privacy is being violated, security of their data compromised, they will never come back to you, let alone your app.
So it’s important to make your app developer take your security concerns seriously.
We at Applify keep security at the center of every app we built, write to us for a free consultation.
