Security Risks and Prevention Capabilities in Mobile Application Development

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Article References
Michalska, A., & Poniszewska-Maranda, A. (2015). Security risks and their prevention capabilities in mobile application
development. Information Systems in Management, 4(3).120-132.
Mobile applications are the systems and the software that are increasing the significance of smartphones day by day. These systems aid
individuals on various aspects. Apart from various benefits, there is the number of risks that will be faced by the mobile applications.
On the basis of the executed research, it has been analyzed that mobile gadgets and devices are considered as one of the biggest
revolutions in today's world and they are often blamed for insecurities. Bad data storage practices, malware, side loading and lack of encryption
all contribute to mobile application vulnerabilities. Nowadays mobile phones completely rely on mobile applications and to a great extent mobile
applications have made our life easy and for so many things we depend on them but after studying these applications carefully I have observed
that with all these free and exceptional services comes lot of threat and issues that we might not be able to solve ( Arp, Quiring, Wressnegger &
Rieck, 2017). When we share our personal data with any of the application it becomes their responsibility to handle our data carefully and ensure
that our data is safe and also does not get manipulated and stolen but most of the times they fail to do so and this is one of the biggest failures of
the mobile application. There are several threats related to mobile application security that I have observed and studied they include, loss of data,
failure in protecting binary, can be hacked easily, lack of encryption or fail to encrypt data, fail to authenticate or authorize, brute force attack,
fail to invalidate the authorized user’s session, poor cryptography and not providing proper security etc. I have analyzed and mentioned all these
reasons related to mobile phone application vulnerabilities and are as follow:

Reflective Essay
Cimler, R., Matyska, J., Balík, L., Horalek, J., & Sobeslav, V. (2015). Security issues of mobile application using cloud computing. In Afro-
European Conference for Industrial Advancement (pp. 347-357). New York: Springer.
Poor handling of data- one of the common loophole in the security of mobile application is not storing the data securely and poor management of
the data, and most of the users do not keep their phone locked and when they are lost or someone steal them it becomes easier for them to extract
the data present in the phone without any proper authentication and if the attacker is performing or studying data forensic can easily access the
data through caches or by simply extracting the file present in the mobile app which has been written poorly ( Cimler, Matyska, Balík, Horalek &
Sobeslav, 2015). Most of the app developers go with the client storage in case of data instead of choosing sandbox environment which ensures
minimum or no security breaches. In this case data can be exploited easily and used without authorization and also can be manipulated easily if
gone in wrong hands, and to make sure the data is safe several precautions can be used: Making sure the data is secure and does not get leaked in
the form of caches and no one without proper authentication can access them. By adding another layer of encryption in addition to the earlier one
that is base level encryption and also by proper verification of data handling during all type of caching (Mousa, Mokhtar, Hasan, Younes,
Hadhoud & Brunie, 2015). Absence or lack of binary protection- when the binary code is not present, attackers can easily get access to data as if
it’s a cakewalk and also jail breaking and rooting allowing the attacker to take over the security measures for protecting the data and also
circumventing all the strategies towards encrypting the data. During this time any malware can attack on the device, enabling all the malicious
code to run over the device being attacked. This malicious attack can change the pattern of the specific mobile application also altering the way
application logics behave and cloning the application and distributing it with some threats that are possible. The absence of rooting can also
result in possible damages like losing the confidential data, security issues and also frauds. In order for skipping the whole situations and
damages because of this, there are some techniques that can be used for instance (Clark & Baker, 2017),