Difference between revisions of "Mobile Top 10 2012-M2"

Revision as of 21:09, 22 January 2014

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

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 referenceshere to those projects and other OWASP projects that provide more robust descriptions.

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

The Worst Offenders

While we cannot go over all of these, what we can do is list vulnerability types that we see most often within mobile applications:

Poor Web Services Hardening

Logic flaws

Testing for business logic flaws

Business Logic Security Cheat Sheet

Weak Authentication

OWASP Top Ten Broken Authentication Section

Authentication Cheat Sheet

Developers Guide for Authentication

Testing for Authentication

Weak or no session management

Session fixation

Sensitive data transmitted using GET method

Insecure web server configurations

Default content

Administrative interfaces

Injection (SQL, XSS, Command) on both web services and mobile-enabled websites

Authentication flaws

Session Management flaws

Access control vulnerabilities

Local and Remote File Includes

References