Developing Android apps? Here are the most important tips to ensure its security.

Developing Android apps has never been a straightforward process. If you are not an expert developer, maybe you end up in troubling scenario. Market is large enough with thousands of makes of devices, hundreds of types of hardware and tens of types of screen sizes. Even, many Android devices do not get timely updates and thus we do also have several flavors of Android OS which do not often have proper support to apps as well.

Irregularities in the Android ecosystem have been causing security issues too. We have seen several malware attacks in which important information of users was put on risk. But that doesn’t mean Android is not secured at all. In fact security breaches happen because of the negligence of Android developers who create risky apps and then users who download those risky apps. These security issues can be handled and addressed in following ways:   

Don’t export components if not necessary

Do not export components if it’s not necessary.  Developers do this to reduce the attach surface of the Android app. Instant filters can be used but they do not provide complete protection of exported components.

Be careful of what the application stores on the mobile device

Developers need to be careful about what their apps are storing in the mobile devices of users. Things to be concentrated include logging and cache. Also see what is stored within the structured data. In most cases, SQLite is used as the database. But if file is not encrypted, simple Linux command can pull information within these files if hackers succeed to access the file system. Things that are risked include insecure storage of user credentials and even passwords.

Use encrypted communication 

In Android app development for SSL/TLS, encrypted communication should be used with the back app server. Because 1024-bit key length is turning out to be a weaker method of encryption, expert developers recommend that the 2018-bit key length should be used for all certificates.

All user input should be treated as un-trusted 

As happens in web apps, users of Android apps should also be treated as un-trusted. Things like cross-site scripting (XSS), JSON/XML injection, SQL and OS command injections should also be handled carefully. Here both client and back app server should be treated to handle these conditions. A good thing to implement here is – avoid using classes which are already known as vulnerabilities in the app code.

Avoid storing sensitive data: 

As much as it could be possible, the app should avoid storing any sensitive data on the Android device. By this way hackers can be kept far away from messing up the app. The idea is that the data should be processed whenever there is a requirement and then should be deleted immediately. Still if the app requires data stored, it should be encrypted.

Apart from these given tips mentioned above, Android apps should go through obfuscation and excessive permissions should be avoided.

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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

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