Mastering Security Testing for Mobile Applications
Understanding the Mobile Threat Landscape
From insecure data storage to weak TLS, the mobile stack exposes unique risks, including deep link abuse, intent hijacking, clipboard leakage, and unprotected content providers. Comment with vectors you’ve encountered and how you validated impact.
Data Storage and Cryptography Done Right
Avoiding Insecure Local Storage
Audit SharedPreferences, NSUserDefaults, logs, caches, and backups. Flag sensitive data like tokens, keys, and PII. Prefer secure keystores, encrypted databases, and ephemeral storage. Tell us how you verify protections across debug and release builds.
Key Management and Proven Libraries
Use platform keystores, hardware-backed keys, and vetted cryptographic libraries. Avoid custom algorithms and static hardcoded keys. Demonstrate misuse with tests that detect weak modes or missing IVs. Share your favorite cryptography linting tools.
Hands-on Exercise: Secrets Scavenger Hunt
Run a secrets hunt across app bundles, logs, backups, and decompiled resources. Document each finding’s impact and remediation. Post your checklist results, and subscribe for a follow-up guide with automated scanning tips.
Multi-Factor and Device Binding
Test push-based MFA, fallback codes, and device attestation. Validate enrollment, recovery, and revocation paths. Confirm that device binding resists cloning and emulators. Share how you balance friction with strong protections in production.
Token Handling and Refresh Safety
Inspect storage locations, clipboard usage, and inter-process exposure. Verify short-lived access tokens, secure refresh flows, audience scoping, and revocation. Comment with scenarios where token replay surfaced through proxy testing or crash logs.
Authorization Checks Beyond the UI
Bypass screens and call APIs directly to confirm server-side authorization. Test IDOR, scope leakage, and vertical privilege escalation. Post your favorite negative tests, and subscribe for our compact authorization testing cheat sheet.
Ethical Traffic Interception with Proxies
Use intercepting proxies to inspect requests, headers, and payloads. Always secure consent and test environments. Try fuzzing parameters and replaying requests. Share your proxy setup tips for iOS simulators and Android physical devices.
Certificate Pinning and TLS Pitfalls
Validate TLS versions, ciphers, and hostname verification. Test pinning strategies, including graceful pin updates and failure handling. Discuss how you safely test pinned builds without weakening production security. Your approaches could help others.
API Abuse Scenarios and Rate Limiting
Probe pagination, filtering, and bulk endpoints for enumeration risk. Validate rate limits, anomaly detection, and lockouts. Post your favorite techniques for finding business logic flaws that static scanners often overlook.
Reverse Engineering, Tampering, and RASP
Decompile, inspect manifests, and search for secrets, debug flags, and exported components. Evaluate third-party SDKs. Share how you document findings so developers can remediate quickly and reproduce results confidently in their environments.
Assess class and string obfuscation, root and jailbreak detection, and integrity checks. Balance security with maintainability. Comment on what actually slowed attackers in your tests, and where RASP produced noise or false positives.
A tester re-signed an app to bypass pinning, unintentionally disabling protections. They rebuilt a safer harness and documented procedures. Share your safest workflows for testing without undermining real-world defenses.
Automation, Tooling, and CI Integration
Automate repetitive checks like dependency scanning, secret detection, and basic static analysis. Reserve complex logic testing for humans. Tell us how you decide which tests graduate into CI and which remain exploratory.
Automation, Tooling, and CI Integration
Add lightweight gates for high-severity findings, signed artifact verification, and SBOM diffs. Keep feedback fast and actionable. Share your pipeline stages, and subscribe for a template CI configuration tailored to mobile security.
