Best Practices for Secure Mobile App Development

Developing a mobile app is great, but securing it is even better. It’s like putting strong locks on your house so that thieves (hackers) won’t steal from it – or worse take it over. When building a mobile app, security is as important as functionality. Without the app being secure, user data could be stolen or exploited for fraud and impersonation. In some cases, an unsecure app gets taken over such that the developer gets locked out and loses profit.

This is why adopting security-conscious practices when developing a mobile app is important. It’s the best way to secure the app users and your investment in the app. Note that adopting the best security practices for developing a mobile app isn’t a one-time thing. Rather, applying the best security practices must continue for as long as the app is in use. 

6 Best Security Practices for Mobile App Development

Adopting secure practices for mobile development isn’t just for the safety of users, it’s a business investment. A secure app is a guaranteed stream of income, and it ensures that your reputation both as a business or developer remains spotless. Here are some of the best practices for secure mobile app development:

Encrypt your source data

Generally, mobile apps often have lots of unstructured data that’s stored in a makeshift database within the mobile device. The lack of structure and encryption makes the source data vulnerable to attacks. Without proper encryption, an attacker could easily access the source data, and rewrite it to execute malicious tasks. This is why the most basic rule of secure mobile app development is that your app’s source code and all other sensitive data must be encrypted and securely stored against unauthorized use. You can implement file-level encryption alongside your database encryption to ensure that even when the database is compromised, the files are still encrypted. 

Validate your app with a code-signing certificate

If you’ve ever received a warning that a downloaded app might be risky, it’s likely because the app has no code-signing certificate. Basically, a code-signing certificate is a digital stamp of approval that shows that a particular app is authentic and secure. When code-signing an app, you’re basically creating two keys; a private one for the developer, and a public key for the app’s users. Both keys are used to digitally sign the mobile app. Once signed, the digital signature is encrypted and verifiable across multiple mobile operating systems. This is why most downloaded mobile apps get scanned once installed to verify the code-signature. By code-signing your app, you’re notifying the public that it is safe and secure.

Validate inputs before execution

When dealing with cyberattacks and mobile app security, paranoia is useful. Always treat external inputs – including user input with suspicion. No input should be automatically executed without validation. Typical cyberattacks like cross-site scripting or SQL injection make use of malicious inputs to access and steal data, disrupt and ultimately take over an app. You can prevent this by setting up multiple validation techniques such as:

Data-type validation: this basically scrutinizes an input to ensure that it’s the right type of input e.g. an input should be a string or integer, not an executable command. 

Format validation: this checks if an input follows the prescribed format e.g. email address and phone numbers with no strange symbols.

Range checking: this checks if an input falls within a specific range of values that is authenticated in the app’s backend.

Encode outputs to counter malicious inputs

While input validation prevents malicious inputs, output encoding ensures that potentially malicious inputs aren’t executed. Basically, if a malicious input passes through validation without being flagged, output encoding basically flags and converts it into a safe format for display or execution on the mobile app. For instance, a malicious input with an executable command is converted to a plain text with an error message that has no effect on the app. 

Run periodic penetration tests and security updates

App security isn’t a one-time deal but a lifetime process. So long as the app is still in use, it constantly needs to be secured. As such, periodic security testing and updates is essential for it to stay defended against cyberattacks. Think of it as periodically inspecting the locks and security systems of your house – you can’t be too careful. 

By periodically testing for vulnerabilities, you can easily detect and fix security loopholes. Techniques like static code analysis, penetration tests, and live security testing, are great ways to assess the current security status of a mobile app. When running penetration tests to simulate cyberattacks, you might want to use VPNs for efficiency – after all hackers often cover their tracks when trying to hack. Here’s a list of Cybernews reviewed VPN with free trial you can use for the simulation.

Once loopholes are discovered, what’s next is to update the app and all its dependencies e.g. third-party apps, libraries and SDKs. Each app update comes with security patches to fix loopholes that were detected during testing. 

Maintain multi-level authentication systems

A mobile app should only permit authorized usage. Users shouldn’t have to compete with someone using a backdoor to access their apps. You should protect the app’s integrity and user access by integrating a multi-level authentication system. This basically involves using authentication processes such as: PINs, one-time passwords, verified third-party authentication, fingerprints, location verification, and even real-time video recording of a user. While it might seem like an overkill, these processes are essential to detecting and flagging fraudulent activity on the app e.g. wire fraud or impersonation.

Conclusion

Building secure mobile apps calls for proactive measures. By adopting security practices like data encryption, access authentication, code-signing, periodic security testing and updates, input validation, and encoding outputs, developers can reduce security risks. The basic rule remains that you can’t be too careful when building an app that’s invaluable to the daily lives of its users. Hence, security is non-negotiable – even if it seems like an overkill.