Projects/OWASP Mobile Security Project/Roadmap

Overview

The OWASP Mobile Security Project is a centralized resource intended to give developers and security teams the resources they need to build and maintain secure mobile applications. Through the project, our goal is to classify mobile security risks and provide developmental controls to reduce their impact or likelihood of exploitation.

Our primary focus is at the application layer. While we take into consideration the underlying mobile platform and carrier inherent risks when threat modeling and building controls, we are targeting the areas that the average developer can make a difference. Additionally, we focus not only on the mobile applications deployed to end user devices, but also on the broader server-side infrastructure which the mobile apps communicate with. We focus heavily on the integration between the mobile application, remote authentication services, and cloud platform-specific features.

Project Components

'In Progress

• Should be considered in the context of mobile computing platforms;
• Individual devices shouldn't be considered, but instead devices intended for mobile use and the mobile style of data consumption (leverage web services and cloud services, minimal processing on client, etc);
• Threat model will shape the Top 10.

Generic Top 10

Timeline - 3 months for initial release

• Using threat model as a base;
• Perform an assessment of the standard top 10 to determine which threats are applicable, not applicable, or applicable in a modified context;
• Perform gap analysis of both standard and mobile top 10 lists to demonstrate differentiation, and provide this document to the community;
• Create the Top 10.

Fork Into Each Platform

• iOS Project
• Android Project
• webOS Project
• Windows Mobile Project
• Blackberry Project

Alternate Development Environments For Mobile (Besides Java and Objective-C)

• Flash
• AIR
• MonoDroid
• MonoTouch
• MacRuby
• Perl

What each platform project could contain

• Description of the security model
• Assessment checklist
• Wikis on individual vulnerabilities relevant to the platform
• Defensive coding techniques
• API security features
• References to related OWASP projects and resources
• Attacks and historic vulnerability information for each platform in "lessons learned" format

Mobile Development Guide

Using the threat model, Mobile Top 10, and other major areas identified through each other sub project, create a mobile development guide. The guide could follow the same general format as the regular development guide, or deviate slightly due to the vast differences between platforms.