Mobile Top 10 2012-M2

Threat Agents	Attack Vectors	Security Weakness		Technical Impacts	Business Impacts
Application Specific	Exploitability EASY	Prevalence COMMON	Detectability EASY	Impact SEVERE	Application / Business Specific
Threat Description	Attack Vector Description	Security Weakness Description		Technical Impacts	Business Impacts

Am I Vulnerable To Weak Server Side Controls?

The M2 category is one that is always in heavy debate. It encompasses almost everything that a mobile application can do badly that does not take place on the phone. Which is exactly the argument… should it be listed at all? Don’t we have Top Ten lists for Web Applications? Don’t we have one for cloud too?

In fact, we do. If we could be altogether sure that everyone who wanted information on mobile security also stopped by those projects… it would be a perfect world. Unfortunately, after two rounds of data collection from some of the world’s top assessment teams, we find that server side issues are so prevalent in mobile applications that we cannot ignore them in the Risk listing. M2 is only .52% lower in prevalence than M1 (Insecure Data Storage) and almost always trumps M1 findings in terms of overall risk. While not statistically validated we feel that several factors lead to bad mobile application server code (and on a larger scale mobile insecurity in general):

Rush to market
Lack of security knowledge because of the new-ness of the languages
Easy access to frameworks that don’t prioritize security
Higher than average outsourced development
Lower security budgets for mobile applications
Assumption that the mobile OS takes full responsibility for security
Weakness due to cross-platform development and compilation

How Do I Prevent Weak Server Side Controls?

Secure coding and configuration practices must be used on server-side of the mobile application. For specific vulnerability information refer to the OWASP Web Top Ten or Cloud Top Ten projects. We will try and link references to those projects and other OWASP projects that provide more robust descriptions.

Example Scenarios

If you look below, you can see that there is a ton of surface area to cover when thinking about M2: