Application hardening is a cornerstone of any secure software development lifecycle, but it’s sometimes treated as an afterthought. Explore some of the application hardening techniques we recommend for your mobile or desktop applications, and how they can help you prevent a costly security breach.
Application hardening, or app hardening, refers to the techniques cybersecurity experts use to protect applications from security breaches and other threats. It makes applications more challenging to breach and reduces their attackable surface area.
App hardening is designed to prevent everything from IP theft to software piracy and data breaches. It can also save your company money—after all, prevention is less expensive than damage control.
Your team needs to take multiple steps to take a truly comprehensive approach to application hardening. Some of the steps we recommend include:
This list is non-exhaustive. However, the more of these steps you take, the safer your application will be.
Your approach to app hardening should use multiple layers of different security techniques. These are some of the application hardening examples we recommend using for your application.
Renaming your code is one of the most basic code obfuscation techniques you can use to protect your application. However, there are ways to take it a step further.
Dotfuscator and DashO can help you implement control flow obfuscation. Traditionally, this involves introducing false conditional statements and misleading statements, but these programs take it a step further. They destroy the code patterns decompilers use to replicate source code and introduce spaghetti logic that can break compilers or turn their output into pure guesswork.
Protecting your application should start from the very beginning of the development process. Take a DevSecOps approach to your coding practices by following a few of these guidelines from our sister organization, Kiuwan:
One of the most common techniques hackers use is locating critical sections of code by looking for string references inside your binary code. For example, if you have a time-lock feature on your application, it may display a message when the user’s session is about to time out.
Hackers can search for this message when they decompile your code—and easily find ways to compromise your algorithm and use it for their own purposes.
By encrypting data, including user strings, in sensitive areas of your application, you can add an extra barrier to your code. However, this can incur a slight runtime penalty—which is why programs like Dotfuscator only perform string encryption on specified sensitive areas of the app.
This includes both strong passwords and requesting multiple forms of verification from users, along with account lockouts to deter brute force attacks. Taking a preventative approach to authentication by requiring MFA can make it more challenging for hackers to break into your application using a user’s account.
However, implementing proper authorization measures goes hand in hand with that practice. Implementing a role-based access control system prevents users—and the hackers who break into their accounts—from being able to get where they’re not supposed to be within your app.
All told, your application should require strict authentication and only provide as much privilege as users need to be able to perform their designated tasks.
Security testing should be routine for your developers and app management team. Having quarterly or monthly—or possibly even more frequent—security tests and audits can keep your team aware of any emerging security issues. You can also use them to take a more proactive approach to every facet of your app security plan.
If your application is like 90% of those in use today, it likely has at least a few open-source components in its source code. Using open-source components has been a game-changer for developers for decades because it saves them countless hours of having to build basic components.
However, open-source components frequently have dependencies, which can become vulnerable if you aren’t updating them constantly.
By using programs like Dotfuscator, you can perform a dependency analysis of the input assemblies in your application. This allows you to better understand how your dependencies are related and take steps to protect them and further isolate potential security incidents.
Logging frameworks can serve as barometers for your application’s security in real time. By having a timestamped record of events that occur within your app, you can evaluate how the system was able to prevent potential incidents—or what can be done to prevent them from happening again.
Nobody likes to think about the worst-case scenario, but preparing for it can help you minimize the damage.
Having a detailed incident response plan that enables your team to act quickly makes incidents easier to contain. This may look different for every application, but a cybersecurity expert can help you develop a response plan and prepare for it with your team.
The other side of this preventative measure is making sure you keep up with the latest available security patches for your application and its components—including third-party and open-source code. Doing so can protect your application from hackers using known vulnerabilities to their advantage.
Our app hardening tools make it easier to build and maintain a secure application, without sacrificing speed or code quality. Request a free trial of Dotfuscator, DashO, Defender for iOS, and JSDefender today.