OWASP Mobile Top 10 - Vulnerabilities to Avoid

Apply the confidentiality, integrity and availability model to secure mobile software, balancing security with design focused on usability and complexity across the software development life cycle before, during, and after.

Master risk management for mobile apps by identifying assets, vulnerabilities, and threats, and applying five strategies—ignore (not recommended), avoid, mitigate, accept, and transfer—to reduce residual risk.

Explore threat modeling within the SDLC, compare Stride and Dread approaches, define attack scenarios, and apply an A/T/C model to map assets, threats, and controls.

Explore how encryption, hashing, and digital signatures protect plaintext and ciphertext, and distinguish symmetric and asymmetric encryption, block and stream ciphers, in the context of the OWASP mobile top ten.

Explore insecure authentication and authorization as the top OWASP mobile risk, and examine how failures occur. Apply best practices to verify user identities and define permissions to prevent unauthorized access.

Describe insecure authentication and authorization in mobile apps, highlighting how failed verification hides user identity, weakens access controls, disrupts logging, and threatens confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Explore threat modeling across hidden service requests and secret disclosures, including rainbow table risks. Apply server-side validation for authentication and authorization; store minimal data and encrypt or hash sensitive data.

Enforce strong, server-side authentication and authorization for mobile apps, ensuring parity with web applications. Avoid weak patterns, local storage risks, and insecure remember me practices.

Secure your app's communications by using secure transport layer protocols, verifying certificate authenticity and integrity, and preventing data interception by bad actors.

Assess insecure communication vulnerabilities across all mobile channels, where flawed encryption or misconfigurations—such as deprecated protocols or bad certificate settings—lead to data interception, disclosure, or tampering.

Explore threat modeling to prevent information leakage of personally identifiable information and credentials from insecure communications between your app and remote endpoints, enforcing transport security, certificate inspection, and encryption.

Implement transport security across all mobile app workflows, enforce strong cipher suites with CA-signed certificates, and securely handle data before transmission to prevent eavesdropping.

Secure mobile app supply chains by identifying all components in a software bill of materials, including third-party code, and assess build-time risks from malicious actors, then apply lifecycle controls.

Explore how inadequate supply chain security lets attackers insert malicious code during the build via third parties or compromised open source components, risking data access or takeover.

Explore threat modeling for mobile supply chain security, focusing on malware injection, compromised components, broken signing processes, and protecting against malicious developers, with strong SDLC controls to safeguard code integrity.

Detect and prevent supply chain vulnerabilities by testing third-party components end-to-end, enforcing secure coding and security awareness training, and securing contractual protections with vendors.

Identify the risks of collecting and using personal data (PII), ensure opt-out options, minimize data use, and protect how and where you store sensitive information.

Describe the vulnerability of inadequate privacy controls, how attackers access PII, including PHI and PFI, through compromised apps, and the business, legal, and reputational risks involved.

Explore threat modeling of three common privacy vulnerabilities in mobile apps: unintended disclosure in logs and errors, unsafe URL parameter handling of PII, and PII in backups, with protective controls.

Minimize privacy related data by reducing PII and PHI, masking data, enforcing retention, and obtaining user consent; use privacy and threat modeling with static/dynamic testing to prevent leaks.

Explore improper credential use by examining embedded, locally stored, or device-stored credentials and secure network transfers to prevent exposure and threats, unlike insecure authentication.

Explore improper credential usage from generation to storage and transmission, and learn how weak practices enable unauthorized access to mobile apps and back-end services, credential stuffing, and monetization.

Apply threat modeling to mobile apps by examining insecure credential transmission and storage, and enforce strong transport encryption and at-rest protection with encryption or one-way hashes.

Avoid hard coded credentials; use revocable tokens like jwt, saml, and api tokens with secure transport. Inspect resource, configuration, and database files for composite credentials during code reviews.

Learn to prevent OWASP mobile top 10 vulnerabilities by sanitizing inbound input, encoding outbound output, and applying white-list checks for untrusted sources.

Explore how insufficient input and output validation enable attacks like SQL injection, command injection, and cross-site scripting, and how incomplete validation harms CIA triad and security.

Threat modeling focuses on preventing remote code execution and injection attacks by sanitizing and validating all input, encoding output, and protecting data in transit to preserve backend and API integrity.

Apply strict input validation and output encoding to mobile apps, preferring whitelists over blacklists, and validate data in the correct context across UI, files, URLs, and config inputs.

Identify security misconfiguration as a vulnerability where a security control is left off or misconfigured, start secure by default, warn users about impact, and avoid unnecessary device features.

Identify and prevent security misconfigurations in mobile apps by auditing as-is versus as-desired configurations, disabling debugging features, and enforcing secure storage, permissions, and access controls.

Explore threat modeling for mobile apps by examining insecure default settings, excessive storage permissions, and unnecessary permissions, plus controls to enforce minimum necessary security.

Detect and prevent mobile security misconfigurations by thorough security assessments, code reviews, and testing to compare actual vs. desired configurations and ensure traceability from design to production with secure defaults.

Learn how the misuse of cryptography jeopardizes mobile app security and discover steps to ensure strong encryption, proper key management, and robust hashing.

Identify how insufficient cryptography in mobile apps can expose confidential data and intellectual property through weak algorithms, poor key management, insecure randomness, and flawed libraries, using threat modeling.

Threat modeling addresses three cryptography risks: weak hash functions, implementation flaws, downgrade attacks, and promotes secure hashes like sha-256 and bcrypt to protect app and device storage and external communication.

Use strong, widely accepted encryption algorithms such as AES, RSA, ECC, secure key management with key vaults or HSMs, protect data in transit with TLS, and hash functions with salts.