Insecure communication and its impact on the mobile application security

Smartphone security has become very important to be taken into account both from the consumer and organization perspective because these smartphone applications nowadays are associated with financial transactions. So, nobody is very much interested in taking risks with finance which is the main reason that paying attention to the concept of mobile application security from the developer’s perspective is important. Since smartphones are now a very integral component of our lives and applications have been very well used by people due to the sensitive information, protecting the sensitive information is important because this is only possible whenever the communication is safe and secure

What do you mean by the concept of insecure communication?

Insecure communication very well refers to the communication that will be taking place between the client and the server or between multiple servers over insecure channels. The communication will involve the transmission of unencrypted data then the communication channel will be very vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Man-in-the-middle attacks will usually have two main phases which are:

1. Interception: In this particular stage the attacker will be intercepting the traffic before it reaches the intended destination and further is associated with IPS spoofing, DNS spoofing, or any other kind of related things.
2. Decryption: Once the data stream has been very well intercepted, this step will begin and the basic goal of this particular step will be to decrypt the traffic without any raising of the red flags at any point in time. The attacker over here will be using several methods like HTTPS spoofing, SSL hijacking, and stripping systems at any point in time.

How will insecure communication happen?

Insecure communication is a very significant challenge as read with the security the mobile applications and now has been considered as the most exploited risk by the OWASP mobile top 10 list. If the data has been intercepted or changed without any detection then everybody will have a clear idea that the application will be vulnerable to insecure communication. There are plenty of tools available in the market that can highlight any application and further transmit the data as clear text. Insecure transmission is not only caused by how data has been transmitted further, The Mobile applications, in this case, will be either a native, hybrid, or web-related application. The type of application will perfectly detect which of the channels of mobile application communication will be taking place over and further, all of these channels will include different sets of vulnerabilities that you need to take very seriously throughout the process. As a very basic example, establishing the secure channel, mobile application and the endpoint successfully will be based upon connecting the entire system of TLS and performing the TLS handshake. 

However, the mobile application in this particular case will not at all be inspecting the certificate provided by the server and will also be accepting any kind of certification provided by the server unconditionally. This will be the mutual authentication between the mobile application and the other point and through the TLS proxy, the mobile application will be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. all of these security lapses in the design will lead to some security vulnerabilities and the report by Positive Technologies has also discovered that 35% of mobile application devices are extremely vulnerable to the insecure communication of sensitive user data in the whole process

Some of the basic details of risks and impact associated with insecure communication have been explained as: 

1. Insecure communication can be disastrous on multiple levels and as a business, you also need to have a good understanding of the basic suffering of irreversible reputational damage because this will be the primary method of violating user privacy.
2. Any kind of security breach can easily lead to identity theft and fraud and further one of the most significant breaches in this particular case has to be taken into account so that active users are never compromised
3. The organizations need to focus on the admin account in this case because it will be dealing with this sensitive data and if the account has been intercepted the attacker will have accessibility to the entire application which further will promote the accessibility to the sensitive user data. It is critical for people to have safeguarding systems that have been tested thoroughly so that the development step has been sorted out and there is no chance of any kind of problem.

Following are the very basic steps to be taken into account to remain protected from insecure communication-related problems:

1. The organization needs to work with the assumption that the network layer is insecure
2. Everybody has to focus on accounting for third-party entities like analytical companies and social networks
3. People need to be clear about the industry standard systems along with the transmission of sensitive data so that the back and application programming interface will be very well sorted out
4. The organization should ensure that SSLC certificate certificates are never undertaken through the concept of and you should always use the ones that have been signed by the trusted CA provider
5. It is important to consistently enforce the SSL chain verification system
6. If any kind of invalid certification has been detected it is always important for people to ensure that user alerts have been very well sent out right from the beginning throughout the process
7. It is advisable for people to never take any chances with sensitive data because the secondary layer of encryption before you are dealing with the sensitive data has to be sorted out because it will be acting as the most important line of defense
8. People need to ensure that they are never sending sensitive data over channels like MMS, SMS, or push notifications.

Hence, understanding the concerns of insecure authentication from the perspective of mobile application security is important so that everybody can incorporate the mechanisms of detecting the tempering and other associated things very easily. In this way, the transmission of information between the applications and mobile devices will be very well protected and storage of the sensitive data will be proficiently done on the right devices without any problem.