Common Security Threats

Applications are integral to modern digital experiences, powering everything from mobile banking to healthcare services. A single security flaw can lead to data breaches, financial loss, and severe reputational damage. Therefore, balancing the rapid delivery of new features with robust security measures is crucial.

A comprehensive approach to application security involves addressing well-known weaknesses, such as injection flaws, broken authentication, and insecure data handling. Additionally, securing the code itself, especially for client-side applications, is vital. Techniques like code obfuscation and anti-tamper measures make it significantly harder for attackers to reverse-engineer and exploit your app.

Many of the concepts described herein are inspired by the OWASP Top Ten, which you can review in full here: OWASP Top Ten.

Common Application Security Vulnerabilities

Application security vulnerabilities are weaknesses in an application’s design, code, or configuration that attackers can exploit. These vulnerabilities often arise from poor coding practices, lack of input validation, and insufficient testing.

Some specific vulnerabilities include:

• Injection Flaws: Occur when untrusted input is sent to an interpreter as part of a query or command. This allows attackers to manipulate queries, execute malicious commands, or gain unauthorized access to data.
• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): Arise when an application includes untrusted data without proper validation or escaping. Attackers inject malicious scripts into a web page viewed by other users, enabling them to steal session tokens, manipulate the DOM, or perform other unauthorized actions.
• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF): Exploit the trust a website has in a user’s browser. An attacker tricks users into executing unwanted actions on a web application where they are authenticated, such as changing account settings or making transactions, without their knowledge.
• Insecure Direct Object References (IDOR): Occur when an application exposes internal object references (e.g., database keys) without proper authorization checks. Attackers can manipulate these references to access or modify data they shouldn’t be able to, leading to data leaks or unauthorized actions.
• Security Misconfiguration: Occurs when developers set up applications, frameworks, servers, or databases with insecure defaults, incomplete configurations, or unnecessary features enabled. This can lead to exposed debug information, outdated components, or improperly configured security headers.
• Sensitive Data Exposure: Occurs when applications fail to adequately protect critical information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, or authentication credentials. Attackers can intercept, steal, or misuse this data if it is not encrypted or stored securely.
• Insufficient Logging and Monitoring: Detecting and responding to security incidents without proper logging and monitoring is difficult. Insufficient logging can leave businesses unaware of suspicious activities, while a lack of monitoring may prevent them from taking action to mitigate attacks before damage is done.
• Other Threats: Supply chain attacks have also become a significant threat in application security where attackers compromise third-party components or dependencies. Zero-day vulnerabilities are security flaws unknown to vendors or unpatched, exploited by attackers before a fix is released. Poorly secured APIs can become major entry points for attackers, leading to data breaches and service disruptions. Cloud environments introduce new security challenges like misconfigured services and insecure APIs.

Security Flaws That Can Introduce Vulnerabilities

These are some of the most common issues found in insecure applications:

• Improper Data Storage: Ensure that passwords, cryptographic keys, and other credentials are stored securely. Avoid caching sensitive data or including it in application logs. Use native operating system configurations for storage to enhance security.
• Weak Cryptography: Avoid using outdated or weak cryptographic algorithms. Implement strong cryptographic practices, such as using pseudorandom number generators and white-box cryptography, to protect sensitive data from being reverse-engineered.
• Weak Authentication & Session Management: Limit the duration of inactive sessions and ensure data remains hidden when apps are in the background. Avoid client-side permissions and authentication, as they can be discovered and exploited by attackers.
• Insecure Network Communications: Encrypt all network communications to prevent attackers from intercepting sensitive data. Use certificate pinning to ensure connections are secure and employ platform-specific security APIs for additional protection.
• Poor Code Quality and Build Settings: Adopt secure coding practices and regularly review and update third-party libraries. Ensure that debug symbols are not left in the code to prevent potential security breaches.
• Lack of Resiliency against Reverse Engineering: Implement code obfuscation techniques to make it difficult for attackers to understand and reverse-engineer your code. Add anti-tamper measures and monitor released apps for unauthorized modifications. Compromised apps should be shut down or deprecated to maintain security.

Identifying Application Security Vulnerabilities

Security audits and penetration testing are essential practices for identifying vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. Automated vulnerability scanning tools like SonarQube, Semgrep, OWASP ZAP, and Dependency-Check analyze an application’s code, dependencies, and configurations to detect known vulnerabilities.

In addition to regular security audits, you can take a proactive approach and pay close attention to these common areas of interest:

• Access-Control Routines: Access-control routines, used to authenticate and authorize users, are the front door to your application. Identify these routines and the execution paths to and from them: typically, the routine itself, the branch that executes if authentication succeeds, and the branch that executes if execution fails. As all these branches can help the attacker identify the functionality of the routine, all branches must be protected.
• Valuable Functions, Algorithms, or Data: Valuable functions, algorithms, or data that are key to your intellectual property require the highest level of obfuscation. These might be algorithms that define key functions in a game, missile trajectories that the military might want to conceal, and so on.
• Program Module Interfaces: Program module interfaces govern dependencies between executables and service modules. In particular, you will want to protect published interfaces like exports from a shared library or code that identifies imported interfaces.
• Control Flow Review: Review control flow so you can make good decisions about where to invoke guards. You might need to invoke a guard in the following situations:
  • A module’s entry point
  • Before a function call
  • When a certain variable holds a particular value
  • Before a certain other guard is invoked
  • Before a conditional jump, so that the invocation does not depend on the branch taken
  • After a shared library is loaded
• Self-Modifying Instructions: Self-modifying instructions that can be modified by other code in the same program at runtime cannot be protected by obfuscation, nor can such code include invocation locations for guards. It is important that you identify these and limit your protection to what is appropriate.
• Performance-Critical Code: Performance-critical code that might be impacted by the kind of guard you choose should be identified so that you can maximize protection without losing performance.

Mitigating Application Security Vulnerabilities

Adopting secure coding practices prevents vulnerabilities from appearing in the first place, but good code is not enough. Digital.ai Application Security provides you with the tools necessary for truly securing your apps through code obfuscation, anti-tamper techniques, ensuring code integrity, application monitoring, and runtime application self protection.

For more information, see App Security Best Practices.