In 2020, people are excessively accessing their smartphones. Right from online banking, chatting, shopping to handling your online businesses, people these days are not only greatly depending on the mobile apps but also keeping sensitive data in mobile phones.

According to analytics, 57% of the digital media time is spent on using smartphones and tablets.

Did you know:

• Mobile apps were downloaded for over 204 billion times in 2019 and with the increasing usage of applications, it is for sure that figures must be jumped to the next level in the coming years.
• The forecast from Juniper Research report reveals that approx 2 million people that is around 40% of the world’s adult population, are approaching online banking apps.

With the increasing usage of mobile apps these days, app security has become one of the serious issues for developers and users.

No matter whether you are an iOS or an Android user, applications tend to contain critical vulnerabilities on both platforms.

Just have an idea with the below image:

So in this post, we will discuss how to increase the security of the Flutter based applications and minimize the risk of vulnerabilities in the application…Why it is important to hire a flutter developer and what are the benefits of choosing Flutter for mobile app development.

However, before jumping on the tips to increase the security of the Flutter based applications, we need to understand “what are the common vulnerabilities and security issues arises in the mobile app?”.

5 Biggest App Security Risks and Solutions That App Owners Should Aware of in 2020

According to the Gartner Reports, 75% of the mobile apps fail to clear mobile security tests that ultimately put your sensitive data and documents at high risk.

So here are the common security risks that every app owner should take it seriously:

1. Unauthorized Access To Your App

Providing access to the app without verifying the user’s authentication is the biggest security risk. So the app must be ensuring that the user should be a true user and should temporarily lock the access in case of multiple failed login attempts.

**Solution: **Flutter always puts the app security at the top list, therefore, providing developers with the security and authentication plugins. By integrating this sign-in plugin to your app, you can easily add a user authentication verify check to your app. Also, you can ask any app development company for a better solution with the official plugins.

Pro Tip:_ To enhance the security of your app, always integrate official security plugins of Flutter instead of handling app verification yourself. For instance, you can integrate Google sign-in plugin for Google Authentication._

2. Leaking of Sensitive Data

These days, with the excessive usage of the mobile phone, your mobile apps have all the sensitive data right from your user IDs, password, PIN, financial details, personal details, and more. Your sensitive data can be easily compromised if the app security controls fail to be implemented rightly in the app. The weak app security can allow unauthorized parties to access all the information on your app.

Solution:

Flutter provides a secure data storage plugin for both the leading operating systems with the name of**_ NSUserDefault for iOS and SharedPreferences for Android_**. These plugins provide a secure storage facility but it is recommended to avoid storing your sensitive data including passwords and PIN numbers.

_Pro Tip: _Like most mobile apps, is your mobile app also using in-memory cache to provide quick access by directly fetching the data from the stored memory? If yes, then you need to think twice, that is why you are keeping all the data on the mobile all the time. You should consider the core security principles that ask you to only keep the data that you often need. To keep your data safe, it is worth setting up a periodic time for automatically cleaning the data cache that has been expired.

When using a Flutter based app, it always provides the information when you are about to switch to background mode. You can access the information to set up a timer for regular clean-ups of the cache with the permission of the user.

3. Session ID Attacks by the Unauthorised User

Either intentionally or unintentionally, sometimes anyone can try to steal the sensitive information of your phone or may even try to steal the identity of the valid user. For example, you lend your phone to your friend for playing games or allow any guest at your home to access your phone, they can try to access the information that you want to keep it private from them.

Or sometimes, any colleague can intentionally try to access your corporate email to steal important information. The best way to protect information is to integrate some unpredictable passwords or locks to your phone that can’t be cracked by unauthorized users.

Solution:

Despite using the device-level security (Unlock Screen), it is important to integrate app-level authentication to keep the sensitive data remain private and secure in the app. In fact, app-level authentication can add an additional layer of protection to mobile content. Therefore, Flutter provides special authentication plugins like TouchID for iOS and FP Sensor for Android apps to uplift the app security.

_Pro Tip: _Since numerical or alphabetical passwords are predictable, therefore it is advised to use only officially approved fingerprint or touch ID locks. Moreover, it adds more convenience to access it multiple times and secures your data from malicious users.

4. Code Injections Via Malicious User

Code injections are one of the most common practices by the attackers that access the database of your app and insert the unauthorized codes into the existing coding. Injecting unwanted codes can result in major issues like data loss or corruption, a total takeover of the app, or denial of access as well. The scariest thing about it is, that this type of attack isn’t so hard to execute.

Solution:

Developers can easily increase the security of the Flutters apps as all the plugins come up with the required permissions that are already baked into the plugin code. So if you are integrating officially approved plugins in the app, you don’t need to further add additional codes for unauthorized code injection. Moreover, it is advised to hire a software development company for quick assistance.

_Pro Tip: _In case your app has native codes, then it is required to add additional permissions to your app to avoid putting the sensitive data at risk.

5. Securing The Smaller App Window

It’s common to switch to another task by accessing the smaller windows of the app. But unfortunately, the smaller windows of your app can still show the content to the user in the minimized window. The malicious user can easily get the information from this small screen despite having your app protected from the additional measures such as Touch IDs or face scanning. Flutter app development companies can easily understand the pain of the users and implement such strategies to secure your app from malicious users.

Solution:

Flutter is not providing any official plugin to secure your app window as the implementation process is depending on the native APIs and application life cycles. However, still, there is a hope to enhance its security of your app. Hire a Flutter developer as Flutter provides detailed instructions to secure your app window for both OS.

#mobile-app-development #startup #mobile-apps #security #flutter