Now these days, smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the way companies do their business. With rise of smartphones, the consumer mobile application market has seen an exponential growth in the last three years. These mobile applications have provided the consumers convenient access of their credit card data, bank account, personal emails and personal identifiable information to name a few. All these mobile applications have extended the network of businesses and thus exposed the businesses to new types of security threats.
As compared to desktop application, mobile applications are difficult to test for security; hence, these are often less tested. Furthermore, the mobile applications are not necessary more secure than that of the desktop applications. Today, there is a great need of mobile security application testing because if a mobile application is not tested, it can attract the serious attention of cyber criminals andinvite various risks such as:
- The unsecured mobile application is prone to various security threats. These threats include both software-based and physical threats that can compromise the important data on tablets, smartphones and similar mobile devices.
- The mobile security threats comprise everything from mobile forms of spyware and malware to the illicit access to a mobile device’s data. The spyware and malware security threats can access the device’s private data without knowledge of user and can also perform malicious actions, including sending unsolicited messages to the device’s contacts, transferring control of the device to a hacker, making expensive phone calls, and many more.
- The cyber criminals may use the unsecured mobile application to install a backdoor on mobile devices to use it for various purposes, such as recording the keystrokes to steal important bank details or sending spam.
In order to save the device from all these types of threats, application security testing is quite important. While developing mobile apps, you should focus on following potential weak spots:
- Data flow- Establish an audit trail for the data i.e. what data goes where. Make sure the data is in-transit protected and only authentic people have access to the data.
- Data storage– Make sure to store data securely and try to encrypt the data.Keep in mind that cloud solutions can be a weak link for the data security.
- Data leakage– Check if data is leaking to the log files, or it is out through the notifications
- Authentication– Check how users are authorized, and can you track IDs and password in the system?
- Points of entry– You should also check whether all potential client-side routes into the application are being validated or not.
These tips are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of mobile application security testing. One of the important things with mobile app security testing is you cannot merely test the mobile apps and forget about them. You should test the security of mobile application on the regular basis, as new security threats can emerge any time.
If you find difficult or time consuming to perform these mobile security tasks, you can take help from various mobile security testing companies in India.Their application testing experts can check your mobile applications exhaustively for various security vulnerabilities.The effective application security solutions of these companies uncover various security vulnerabilities early in the software development process and help you to provide totally secure mobile application that keep hackers at bay.