Security Testing and Resilience are Critical to Mobile Apps – How?
As Gartner predicted, “By the end of 2015, 75% of mobile apps would fail even the basic security test,” which eventually became true.
Indisputably, the rate of security breach has exceeded all limits. More than two-thirds of the leading enterprises have already suffered huge losses due to breached mobile applications. A single security breach amounts to huge annual costs. Globally, an estimated $50 billion is spent to meet up these losses. Is it worth?
The greatest probable threat to security lies in the vulnerabilities of mobile apps. On August 2016, Apple passed on it’s much awaited iPhone security update to prevent handsets from Pegasus – a sophisticated spyware created to infect as well as spy into your smartphones. This news was a shocker for the world, not just Apple. It also raised questions as to how secure our mobile devices and smartphones are? It was the greatest threat to iOS app development till date.
Why Security Testing Is Required?
Yes, it is the key solution, and there are obvious reasons to justify the same.
- Security testing is necessary to build a secure and safe interface across all software and applications. As such, it can check any application/software for vulnerabilities as well as external attacks like unauthorized login and hacking. When you create app, these factors should be considered.
- Security testing is absolutely essential to ensure data integrity at hand and to check required functionality simultaneously when you create app.
- In addition, it is also a perfect tool to check as well as determine any kind of information leakages with different mechanisms such as firewall, encryption, different software range, etc.
- It also identifies and helps revive/salvage the application or software in case of critical spyware attacks.
What Can Be Done?
Smartphones enabled with 3G and 4G networks are widely being used to access the internet. Users choose to perform their business, social and financial transactions using their smartphones because it is convenient to use. However, they don’t realize that the safety of their data consumed by the end users across apps distributed via several mobile app stores is one of the greatest security threats.
Gartner further predicted that up to 25% of all organizations would come up with their personal applications by the end of 2017.
Only a full-fledged and efficient security test environment can save the mobile applications from being leaked. Whether it is iOS app development or Android app development, app developers and creators should emphasize on these little yet significant issues.
Precisely, it is vitally critical for your business to have secured apps.
To ensure security, your apps should go through rigorous testing strategy to not only analyze security threats and risk, but also to support and eliminate them.
The most important application security testing strategy is to use a secure SSL certificate validation to mitigate risk factors. However, since billions of users are using risky and untrusted networks, they become vulnerable to attacks.
How to do Security Testing for Mobile Apps?
To achieve the objective of keeping apps secured, experts suggest that the following steps can be effective:
- Gather valuable information related to the app before applying any security test strategy.
- Identify all possible threats for the app to be developed.
- Identify different vulnerabilities in the app with previously created methods of tests.
There are dynamic techniques to approach these tests including runtime analysis, forensic methods and much more.
Essentially, with the helpful of effective security testing strategies, it is possible to cover a wide gamut of concerns like privacy, credibility, integrity, authorization, and accessibility.
Experts expect that the mobile applications and app development market would boom in times to come and witness further growth.
Considering that apps are installed and used for varied purposes and intentions, it is best to have a robust security testing framework for interactive testing. It has better relevance and helps with estimating security factors of an application.
Final Thoughts
An array of robust security testing strategies and tools when combined with comprehensive techniques, allows brands and enterprises to identify critical errors and glitches within software and also helps recover information. That makes security testing a key to success in the app development business.
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