With endless of apps getting released every day and ever-changing feature additions, it is more crucial than ever for enterprises to concentrate on security to avert any sort of data breaches. In the last year, many enterprises were confronted with mobile threats using a diversity of attack paths.
Now, have you ever heard about OWASP mobile security? Well, OWASP means Open Web Application Security Project and it is a non-profit foundation that works to enhance the security of applications or software by offering proper guidelines through local and global conferences as well as open sources software project. These projects are like OWASP mobile top 10 projects, proper web application project, even API security project, serverless computing project and so on.
You know there is proper OWASP mobile security testing that helps professionals ensuring security. OWASP mobile testing guide is a type of standard for the mobile application to address different types of tools, techniques and methods with a set of test cases to protect mobile apps.
What to know about Mobile Security Testing Guide (MSTG)?
Well, this mobile security testing guide has a protection testing manual for iOS as well as Android security testers. It encompasses the following:
- Mobile platform internals
- General static and dynamic security testing
- Proper test cases that map to the needs in the MASVS
- Security testing in the realm of mobile app development lifecycle
- Mobile app reverse engineering and tampering
- Measuring software protections
Mobile App Security needs and Verification
The OWASP Mobile app Security Verification Standard (MASVS) is, as the name says it all, a standard for mobile app security. It can be employed by mobile software architects as well as developers seeking to develop secure mobile apps and even that of security testers to promise verification of test results.
A few of OWASP mobile risks
There are top ten OWASP risks but here, have a quick look at some of them:
Inappropriate Platform Usage
The first and most influential vulnerability that levies high risk is improper platform usage. The operating system or that of platform, like iOS or Android used by mobile devices, provides a huge range of functions and features. Uncertain implementation and development practices offer multiple attack paths to the attacker, like API call exposure, misappropriation of iOS Touch ID or even that of Android Intent, and so on.
Android intents, even known as Intent and Intent filters, are accountable for communication between diverse components like that of services, apps, etc. A direct threat associated with Android intents is type of data leakage. Data leakage is a condition in which data gets disclosed due to misconfigurations, errors, or other types of flaws but not related to a specific data breach situation (unauthorized admittance of sensitive data).
By classifying code flaws, the attacker can easily access the application and vaccinate malicious commands to steal data and compromise other types of application features. Similarly, improper storage of iOS keychains, like session keys stored in the local app or that of publicly marked Android Intent, may expose confidential user data or allow unauthorized access.
Insecure Data Storage
Now, this insecure data storage is one of the most intimidating risk to many mobile applications, web apps, IoT devices, and so on. Nearly every application gathers data about its users, called PII (personally identifiable information). In case it gets into the hand of any ill-intentioned type of attacker, such a data can create various consequences ranging from fraud, data theft, reputational harm, regulatory violation, and so on. Insecure data storage should be enhanced with storage policies and features that are safe and configured correctly. It is going to ensure that the sensitive data should not be accessible to any other unlawful person or application.
By rooting the devices that run applications outside of the OS framework can offer the attacker access to sensitive and confidential data, and broken cryptography or that of poor encryption libraries could expose sensitive data or allow the attacker access it. In contrary to it, social frameworks like that of analytics, cookies, advertising, and active sessions have various user information stored in them. In case exploited, it might expose a lot of information to the attacker.
Similarly, in case the attacker or infuses malware in any device, repackages the application or even that of gains physical access to the device, he might then assess the device through freely available software and access the overall app directories to get PII PHI, financial or any other sort of information.
Insecure authentication
The attacker avoids the security controls responsible for exploiting authentication control vulnerabilities like that of improper validation, executing backend API service requests in the absence of a token or bypassing weak policies, and so on. Unintended data disclosures are at times the direct outcome because of insecure authentication or lack of overall platform security controls. Remember that insecure authentication is drastically going to impact the application and communication in case an attacker breaks into confidential information or that of privilege access.
Apprehensive Communication
Unencrypted and that of clear text data transmission offers an open path to an attacker to take away or steal data during the communication. Anybody can intercept such insecure data communication by simply compromising Wi-Fi, installing malware or even that of by a man-in-the-middle type of attack.
Insecure Wi-Fi networks might be used to get access to corporate assets to take away sensitive data utilized for identity theft and that of fraud by cybercriminals. Similar to data in transit, it is crucial to use strong encryption measures to gather and save important data (based on data classification levels) for the company or business.
Conclusion
The bottom line is, you need to remember that Owasp mobile security can offer you a proper overview of different mobile security threats, encompassing mobile device issues as well as threats. You can make use of this as an internal type of security baseline for mobile application development tasks. You can talk to experts at Appsealing for the best step by step guidance and assistance.
