What are the Best Practices to Improve Mobile App Data Security?

As per the latest reports,

In 2020, 97% of the organizations faced mobile threats using various attack vectors.

46% of the organization has at least 2–3 employees that download a malicious mobile app.

There’s a staggering increase of 15% in banking trojan-activity where users’ banking credentials are at risk.

When it comes to mobile app development, mobile app security remains a #1 concern for business owners and mobile app development companies. Any data leakage or compromise with sensitive information (password, PIN no, credentials) can incur a huge loss of business, brand reputation, and valuable customers.

Implementing security codes in the mobile app has become necessary from the development platform to the operating system.

Everyone has been looking forward to the solution to secure mobile app for a long. And that’s the reason why we often receive queries like:

What are the hacks to secure our mobile app completely?

What are the best practices one should follow for mobile data security?

Are there any quick fixes to instantly secure my mobile app?

To answer all your security concerns, we bring you a few unavoidable practices to strengthen your mobile app security to answer all your security concerns.

1. Begin with the source code security

Nowadays, every programming language is easy to read and code. The majority of the programming language is open source and free to use. A big thanks to the availability of up-to-date documentation that makes the learning curve easy for developers.

But the simplicity of the code makes the security vulnerability. Today, hackers know coding language and work day and night to get inside the code and malfunction it to extract data and information.

And that’s why the very first step of mobile app security should begin with source code security.

But, how to secure mobile app source code?

1. You can minimize the code and make it shorten.
2. Add obfuscation.
3. While coding, you can use the OWASP methodology, but don’t restrict yourself to it.

These security practices make your mobile app difficult for hackers to understand your coding language and inject malware. This is how you can safeguard your mobile app.

2. Secure all your servers and network connections

Now, the next step is to secure your network and server connections.

But, what’s the need?

That’s because;

• The server consists of all the important data and files of your app.
• It has your developed API and third-party API to communicate and establish a bridge with the server.
• It helps your mobile app process and delivers the app pages on the client side.

As per the survey conducted by Oracle, network security remains amongst the top three concerns for the IT and telecom industry.

If you remain unsecured, your server may get affected by malicious attackers who may incur a loss of data, user’s trust, and brand reputation.

So, the question that arises is:

How to protect your mobile app server from such malware attacks?

• Protect your CMS
• Secure your MYSQL and another database
• Make sure to monitor your server at regular intervals.
• Use SSL security standards to secure the servers.
• Install firewalls
• Make use of strong passwords to protect servers from unauthorized access.
• Use containerization to store your data.

3. Work on Platform-Specific limitations

Every business does not go for Android and iOS app development. Based on their business requirement, they choose the platform. Each platform has its specific limitation that affects the security aspect of the mobile app.

Do you know: one of the most common ways to hack Android or iOS devices is through its operating system.

So, how to ensure that the platform-specific mobile app security is updated?

• Protect the app from geolocation features that establish communication between device functionality and mobile app.
• Understand user scenarios where platform-specific limitations act as obstacles and work upon the same to safeguard the app security.
• Integrate password and encryption measures to avoid any malware attacks.

Make sure to follow the best security standards with any platform you choose.

4. Secure APIs

As per the survey conducted in 2018, a major cybersecurity concern has been raised for API.

As per the survey, about 63% of the IT professionals are worried about bot attacks, DDoS threats, and enforcing authentication for API.

So, how to secure your mobile app API?

• Protect the input parameter of the API with the help of API profiling
• Combining API profiling with anti-scraping policies for DDOS attack detection
• Ensure API authentication, identification, and authorization for security risk.
• Monitor communication between API and app users.
• Improve mobile security with JSON web tokens
• Setup OAuth, HTTP, SeaCat standardized protocols.

So, make sure you secure APIs used within your mobile apps.

5. Improve your data security

Another mobile app security best practice is to work upon data security.

Recently, Facebook was criticized for breaching data security that leaked the sensitive information of 50m of its users.

Sounds hilarious, isn’t it!

But why does that happen?

Because the system had a loophole, the data was not secured. To ensure that such a situation does not happen within your organization, ensure that your mobile users take preventive measures for data security.

And, how can you do that?

• Formulate a data security strategy that focuses on all areas and possibilities of data breaching.
• Keep an eye on leading brands whose compromised data security and what security methods help them cope with the situation.
• Secure data in the sandbox with the help of SQLite Database Encryption modules.
• Strengthen cybersecurity with a decentralized user-controlled security system.

6. Encrypt the data-in-transit

The most critical part of mobile app security is safeguarding the data packets communicated between the backend and the app users.

So, mobile app security is not restricted to APIs, backend, and source codes. Even data transit needs to be taken care of.

So, what are the best practices a mobile app development company should follow to secure data-in-transit?

• Encrypt all data transferred between server and app users.
• Enable auto-encrypting sensitive data, user prompting, and blocking for data-in-transit security
• Make use of an SSL/TSL certificate for data transfer.
• Avoid reactive security measures and make use of proactive security measures.

7. Avoid Data Leakage

If you’ve worked on any app development services, you might have noticed that the app ask users to grant a permit to access certain kind of data and services.

And the users have no choice except to allow mobile apps to download and grant permission.

This is just a single instance where data leakage is possible. But, if your mobile app compromises on data breaches, your reputation is at stake.

So, how can we prevent data leakage?

• With the help of access controls, restrict data resources as they’re more likely to prevent data leakage.
• Restrict sensitive data exposure to non-privileged users with the help of Dynamic data masking.
• Alert is set up when the system receives a hint of data getting leaked.
• Make use of tokenization that replaces critical data to get leaked.

8. Utilize Cryptography encryption

One of the most advanced data security approaches is to encrypt data using advanced algorithms, i.e., Cryptography. Multiple algorithms work on data encryption. Some of them include AES, DES, Blowfish, and more.

It is highly recommended to use these algorithms for mobile security.

9. Avoid storing critical data

Almost all mobile users store their personal and sensitive data such as credit card details, passwords, and much more on their mobile devices.

Majority of the mobile users store their personal and sensitive information, including passwords, credit card details, bank account numbers, and so more. And you cannot ask them to delete that information.

So, what’s the way out?

• And, you cannot ask the users not to do the same.
• You can ask users to follow the below-mentioned practices:
• First, encrypt the data before it is stored on a mobile device.
• Make sure to implement cookies to secure confidential data.
• Finally, prompt them at regular intervals to delete the unwanted log files.

Conclusion

Mobile app security remains the major concern amongst business owners and app development companies. However, the important thing is to bring an updated solution. Make sure to follow all the practices mentioned above to safeguard your app from data leakage and breaches. You can even hire mobile app developer who can help you implement needed standards that protect your mobile app from being attacked.