Here’s How DevSecOps can Improve Mobile App Security

by Irfan Ak Digital Marketing Strategist

Today, the ultimate goal of a majority of businesses is to create feature-packed, innovative and high-performance mobile apps to meet the ever-increasing demands of their customers. Business owners, marketers, and mobile app developers put their best efforts into developing best app ideas and adding new features and improved functionality to make them stand out. Unfortunately, many mobile app development teams overlook the protection of data and don’t give much importance to include security in the software development lifecycle.

If truth be told, integrating security features into your mobile apps is vital for their success. Gone are the days when a security team performed different tests and integrated security features at the final stage of the development cycle. Now businesses have realized the true importance of mobile app security and are fulfilling the security challenges of mobile apps.

According to the Appdome global survey 2021 survey, 63% of users consider security as the most important feature of mobile apps and 73% of users said they don’t use a mobile app if their data is not protected against malicious attacks. Today’s customers want strong protection from cyber threats and fraud, making it critical for development teams to implement a security feature to mobile apps.

Thanks to DevSecOps, a powerful security approach that makes automated code scanning, pen testing, and malware scanning easier. It can increase your development team’s efficiency to create and deliver quality software and incorporate security into every stage of the development cycle.

If you are currently working on a mobile app development project, here are some easy steps to adopt DevSecOps to build high quality and secure mobile apps.

Let’s get started.

Standard-based Testing

Mobile app developers and security teams that integrate security standards and policy at the initial stage of the development cycle will develop highly efficient apps in a short amount of time. Keep in mind that security standards can easily be applied to different stages of development such as app architecture, design, coding, testing and release phase.

Standard-based testing provides app developers with great control and excellent security features. Mobile app developers with the help of their security team can make the most out of OWASP, an open-source community to better understand threat modeling and security testing standards. OWASP helps you understand different aspects of mobile app development and deployment and guides you on how to protect sensitive information.

Use Security APIs for iOS and Android Apps

In order to fulfill the growing demand of consumers, developers are required to build feature rich and intuitive user interfaces to deliver complex functionalities. It makes it essential for developers to ensure secure data exchange between the app on the device and app’s backend server.

Whether you are developing an iOS app or Android app, you will find key security APIs for both platforms in order to build secure apps with minimal effort. Today, encryption of data between a mobile app and backends has become critically important. App developers can bundle the blackened server’s custom SSL certificate within the app’s code repository.

Automated Security Testing

According to the GitLab 2020 DevSecOps survey, approximately 83% of developers can release code faster with the help of DevOps. The survey also suggests that more than 60% of developers don’t perform static application testing (SAST) scans and 73% don’t run dynamic application security testing (DAST) scans. DevSecOps’s goal is to bring security throughout the software development lifecycle. Thanks to automated security testing, it has made it easier for developers to increase the speed of developing apps at DevOps speed.

With the help of automated security testing, developers can perform static code analysis to highlight all the possible bugs in the code file. All alterations made in code are automatically analyzed, while helping developers to know about the potential security issues. Automated testing, if implemented well, can help your mobile app development company to identify unexpected software behaviors. It also highlights performance hindering issues early in the development lifecycle.

Security Integration into DevOps Toolchain

It’s no surprise that DevOps tools are transforming the ways development companies build software products and mobile applications. Integrating security practices into mobile DevOps tools is a sensible approach to enable autonomous and nonstop security testing. It will eventually increase security and enable developers to build quality products and deliver apps on time.

Integrating a security testing tool across the CI/CD pipeline can enable autonomous security testing of every build. Furthermore, integrating security tools into DevSecOps workflow ensures continuous security, allowing organizations to protect important data.

Code Remediation

Code remediation is an amazing security technique that eliminates all the potential loopholes in the code to ensure app’s security. It can prevent hackers from reverse engineering your app and make it difficult for them to crack its code. Code remediation can increase the complexity of the code which will eventually make reverse engineering more difficult.

Usually, Android and iOS apps are more vulnerable to security attacks due to their user interface design. Implementing secure coding practices has become a necessity for development teams to fulfill the basic security requirements of applications’ code.

Final Thoughts

These are a few most important security measures your mobile app development team can take when it comes to building super-fast and secure apps. Thanks to the DevSecOps framework, it makes it easier for development and security teams to integrate advanced security measures into the development process. More and more companies are thinking of adopting a DevOps approach into the mobile app development process to achieve a high degree of security and accelerate the rate at which your team develops efficient apps.