Deep dive into essential Mobile Application Security Testing practices

Gone are the days when mobile phones served the purpose of mere communication. Always in our pockets or our hands - the world has become too obsessed with mobile phones because of the greater access to digital content. They are transforming everyday life at different touchpoints by providing seamless experiences.

In today’s fully interconnected ecosystem, a substantial number of users spending 90% of their time using mobile-dedicated applications related to communication, entertainment, productivity, shopping, and social media. And this global percentage of mobile users is expected to touch 8.4 billion by 2025. This is putting companies under immense pressure to become technologically forward and deliver more compelling yet consistent mobile-centric experiences to their users.

To stay relevant, the adoption of fast, secure, and responsive mobile applications within business ecosystem has become paramount. Marked by an aggressive level of customization, improved hardware capabilities, and greater convenience, mobile apps facilitate a seamless data flow by bridging the gap between users and information. When intersected with virtual try-on Augmented Reality (AR), push notifications, and smart recommendation functionality, they deliver unique mobile shopping experiences with fewer distractions.

Despite being the future of the IoT revolution, adopting a mobile-centric approach in their Digital Transformation journey using responsive and secured mobile applications can be tough. Mobile apps being the always-on brand ambassadors are nothing less than the powerhouse of sensitive information. However, without a proper security patch, they are at the highest risk of ethical hacking, data leaks, and cyber threats. Mobile app vulnerabilities are the most common weak points across Mobile Application Development Lifecycle, exposing user's personal data to unauthorized access.

Protection against cyberattacks and fraudsters is a key to seamless user experiences. To secure customer journeys, companies deploy various layers of security throughout the mobile app development lifecycle to safeguard sensitive user data, company data, and intellectual property. Mobile Application Security Testing is crucial in the process to strengthen the security posture and effectively reduce the potential risks involved.

What is Mobile Application Security Testing?

MAST or Mobile Application Security Testing can be explained as a comprehensive journey. It focuses on a holistic evaluation of numerous mobile application security assessment aspects to detect security vulnerabilities and potential risks early across Android, iOS, and Windows.

The testing process involves a rigorous quality scan of every line of the app's code followed by data storage, frameworks used, authentication mechanisms, encryption of app encrypted elements, and security gaps within app architecture. MAST helps achieve maximum protection against cyber threats and security breaches while preventing implementation errors.

What’s more? Testing security for mobile applications further helps the mobile app development team to identify edge cases that may turn into security bugs if left unattended, posing a risk of breach throughout the production-like environment. Enterprises relying on the MAST approach able to keep fraudulent attacks at bay, including insecure data storage, reverse engineering, data leaks, key loggers, ethical hacking of business networks, inadequate session management, and stolen login credentials.

However, like any other quality engineering approach, the journey of Mobile Application Security Testing involves numerous hurdles like

Best MAST practices to enhance Security of Mobile Applications

To fight back against the expanding threat perimeters in the mobile apps security domain, companies need to embrace a holistic defense strategy rooted in the below-discussed MAST practices. With mobile applications becoming the lifeline of digital interactions, a comprehensive process like MAST helps prevent ethical hacking, improper session handling, code tampering, weak server-side controls, and data leaks through early identification of weak security points. Let’s delve deeper:

1. Rate limiting with OTP

Rate limiting prevents unauthorized access and brute force attacks on mobile applications by quickly putting a restriction on the number of user/device requests triggered within a specified timeframe. To optimize rate-limiting efficiency, the quality engineering team adds an extra security layer through One-Time Passwords (OTPs). Rate limiting combined with OTPs helps companies navigate the weak security points of traditional authentication methods.

Since OTPs are dynamic and time-sensitive in nature, they work as the best blockers for attackers aiming to get unauthorized access to sensitive user data. As an additional authentication factor, rate limiting with OTP makes it difficult for attackers to perform brute force attacks by limiting the number of attempts.

2. Weak lock-out mechanism

Brute force password guessing attacks are one of the most serious security vulnerabilities in mobile application security posture. In such password cracking attacks, the hackers primarily take advantage of a variety of programmatic techniques and automation tools to guess login information or encryption keys. During the trial-and-error process, they make numerous excessive forceful attempts using trillions of possible combination of letters, numbers, and symbols to guess user passwords.

Adoption of weak account lock-out mechanism testing across the mobile application security lifecycle prevents brute force password guessing attacks by blocking the account after 3 to 5 incorrect (unsuccessful) login attempts. As per the weak account lockout mechanisms, the account unlocks only after a predetermined time period using a self-service unlock mechanism. At Kellon, our QA experts execute different tests to evaluate mobile apps mechanism’s resistance whenever a brute force password guessing attack triggers in batches.

4. Ethical Pin Policy (EPP)

Implementing an ethical pin policy is one of the most effective practices used by quality engineering experts to prevent the hacking of sensitive information within mobile applications. In this approach, a PIN (Personal Identification Number) is a game changer in adding an extra security layer for user authentication.

Beyond technical dynamics, the ethical PIN policy primarily focuses on generating strong and secure passwords with a minimum length of eight characters to make PIN complex enough to crack. According to the EEP pattern, it is recommended to create pins with a smart combination of numbers, letters, and special characters. It strictly asks users to avoid easy-to-guess pins that do not adhere to platform-specific secure storage mechanisms, such as Keychain (iOS) or Keystore (Android).

EEP prompts mobile app users to regularly change their pins and restricts the usage of the same password across multiple applications to prevent the potential risks of weak authentication.

5. JWT token encryption

Token encryption is rooted primarily in JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to facilitate secured communication between mobile apps and APIs. By encrypting the JWT tokens, enterprises get an extra layer of security on their enterprise mobile applications. It ensures whenever an episode of ethical hacking or unauthorized access happens, the attackers cannot intercept the sensitive information encrypted in the JWT token, and confidentiality is not compromised. JWT Token Encryption further plays a crucial role in maintaining the integrity quotient of user datasets by preventing risks of tampering or unauthorized modifications through real-time authentication with the legitimate parties involved.

6. Securing the data-in-transit

It is one of the most commonly used practices by Quality Engineering (QE) teams during the mobile application security testing lifecycle. As the name indicates, the process focuses on securing sensitive datasets during transmission to avoid any possibility of unauthorized access. As a result, mobile apps establish seamless and uninterrupted communication with servers, ensuring zero compromise on the confidentiality and integrity of user data involved.

How does this happen? To secure data-in-transit, quality engineers leverage HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) to establish all types of communications between the mobile app and the server. The role of HTTPS is to encrypt sensitive datasets during transit and minimize every risk of man-in-the-middle attacks. In the process, SSL/TLS protocols are also deployed to maintain strong encryption and mitigate risks associated with vulnerable versions.

What’s more? To add an extra layer of protection, MAST experts take advantage of Certificate Pinning to validate the authenticity quotient of the server's digital certificate. This step is crucial in safeguarding the mobile applications ecosystem from unauthorized data inception using fraudulent certificates.

Best Mobile Application Security Testing Tools

1. Burp Suite

Burp Suite is a popular software security application testing tool powered by a comprehensive toolkit including application scanner, proxy server, auto-enumeration, spider, built-in instrumented browser and out-of-band (OAST). It helps in the early detection of security vulnerabilities faster, right across initial mapping and analysis of an application's posture. Using Burp Suite, a quality assurance team can detect cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, manipulate application traffic, and conduct HTTP/2-based testing to address potential security vulnerabilities.

2. OWASP MAS

OWASP (also known as Open Web Application Security Project) is one of the most recognized application security tools with a user-friendly interface and automation capabilities. It is widely used by quality testing experts to improve mobile application security posture by leveraging functionalities like Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP). A feature of OWASP provides automated scanning and helps prevent cyber threats and security vulnerabilities through scanning proxy servers, port identification, directory searching, and identifying brute force attack possibilities. This way mobile app security testing tool enables QA experts to deliver a powerful mobile app designed per MASVS (Mobile Application Security Verification Standard) while ensuring the highest completeness and consistency during a mobile app security test.

3. SQL Injection

SQL Injection is a type of cyber attack where malicious SQL queries are injected into input fields to manipulate a database. Attackers can exploit inadequate input validation and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data, modify databases, or execute arbitrary SQL commands. Preventative measures include input validation and using parameterized queries.

4. Wapiti

Wapiti is an open-source tool used by quality assurance experts to conduct vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. The tool is designed to primarily focus on identifying security weaknesses like inadequate encryption, weak authentication mechanisms, and insecure data storage in mobile and web applications before and after app deployment. It performs "black-box" scans to find issues like SQL injection, command execution defects, server-side request forgery, cookie security flags, cross-site scripting (XSS), CRLF injection, folder and file enumeration, brute force login form, and other vulnerabilities. Wapiti is an ideal choice for penetration testers and security auditors as it supports both GET and POST HTTP methods, along with HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 proxies.

5. Radare

This is a popular choice amongst QA experts to conduct rigorous mobile application security testing. It is an easy-to-configure and run open-source reverse engineering tool. Radare is designed to aid all kinds of software exploitation possibilities through a collaborative analysis underpinned by the embedded web server. QA experts take advantage of Radare to quickly scan, disassemble, debug, and patch mobile app binaries supported by iOS and Android.

Experience maximum mobile application security assessment coverage with Kellon

Do you know security gaps in mobile applications could potentially result in serious data breach losses costing an average of $9.44M? At Kellton, our quality engineering team empowers new-age businesses to strengthen their mobile app security posture through the early mobile application security assessment and detection of application security vulnerabilities.

We run rigorous quality scans at every stage of mobile app development that encompasses the client-server architecture and server-side APIs. This way, we fix any detected security vulnerabilities and deliver multi-layered protection with minimal disruptions in uptime. At Kellton, we also ensure increased security testing coverage and accelerated speed-to-release with up to 70% reduction in Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST) false positives.