Introduction
Developing a smartphone app requires more than just navigation and animations. Data security is one of the most important considerations while designing a mobile app, especially when it comes to sensitive data when any security compromise might result in irrevocable damage.
Almost every app contains sensitive user information. Therefore app security is essential, especially when dealing with passcodes, touch ids, account names, credit card information, and other sensitive data. Many businesses choose to hire software development firms to ensure that their apps are highly functioning and feature-rich. However, they frequently disregard the security of their app.
All JavaScript-based frameworks, including React native, are subject to security concerns. From the perspective of react native security, the various components of the framework, as well as the connections between them, must be considered.
Now, let's discuss the common Security issue in working with React Native Applications.
Click on the following link to read further: Hooks in React JS
Security Issues
Like many JavaScript-based frameworks, React native is prone to security vulnerabilities. From the perspective of react native security, the various components of the framework, as well as the connections between them, must be considered.
Storage of Sensitive Information
There are a few instances where you must define sensitive data in your code, as listed below:
- It's normal to make server calls to acquire data while developing an application, and you'll need to establish API endpoints in your app to do so.
- You may need to integrate third-party authentication, in which case you must define an application secret created on a third-party platform such as Facebook or Google in your application to access their services.
- To incorporate features like notification, messaging, and analytics in your app, you may need to employ open platform services like firebase or Google. It would be best if you also defined the secret of an open platform application in your application to utilize their services.
Keep important keys and secrets out of your app code. Anyone reviewing the app package could access anything included in your code in plain text.
If someone manages to tamper with your API endpoints, everything will come to a screeching halt. Security breaches can take a long time to recover from, which is equivalent to corporate suicide. While most firms will presumably be unaffected by an hour or two of downtime, it is not acceptable for some.
Solutions to help Storage of Secure Information
- We need to utilize react-native-dotenv and react-native-config to protect API endpoints.
- The same technique that we will explain as an alternative to Async Storage will be used to specify secrets of open platform services like Facebook and Google Firebase because these secrets will also be stored locally on the device.
- Note that the react-native-config module does not encrypt secrets for packaging. Therefore sensitive keys should not be stored in the .env file.
Selecting Local Storage for data persistence
Whether to support your app for being used offline, reduce network queries, or save your user's access token between sessions, so they don't have to re-authenticate each time they use the app, you'll frequently discover the need to save data on the device. To save various forms of data in the device, we use Async Storage in React Native.
Security Issue
Async Storage is an unencrypted, asynchronous key-value storage. Because Async Storage uses an unencrypted technique, it makes your data vulnerable to hackers. In Async Storage, we can preserve non-sensitive data, redux state, Graph-QL state, and global application-level variables. However, for sensitive information such as tokens and secrets, we must use a different route.
Solutions to help in Local Storage for Data Persistence
There is no way to store sensitive data in React Native. There are already pre-existing solutions for Android and iOS that we can use with React Native by configuring it on the native side.
Deep Linking
Deep linking is a method of transferring data from an external source straight to a native program. A deep link looks like an app:/, where the app is your app scheme, and the / could be used to handle the request inside.
For example, if you were developing an e-commerce software, you could use app:/products/1 to visit the product detail page for a product with id 1.
Deep connections are insecure and shouldn't be used to transport sensitive information.
Security Issue
- Because there is no centralized mechanism for registering URL schemes, deep linkages are insecure. You can use whatever URL scheme you like as an app developer by specifying it in Xcode for iOS or adding an intent for Android.
- By employing the same approach, malicious software can access the information included in your link. While sending something like app:/products/1 is safe, sending tokens poses a security risk.
- A single URL Scheme can be claimed by many apps on iOS. Sample:/, for example, can be used by two completely different apps to implement URL Schemes. This is how some malicious apps exploit the URL Scheme to access users' data.
Security solutions to overcome this issue of deep linking
Universal Links were introduced in iOS 9 to address the lack of graceful fallback functionality in custom URI scheme deep links. Universal Links are regular web links that can be used to access both a web page and content within an app. When you open a Universal Link, iOS checks to see if any of your apps are registered for that domain. If this is the case, the program will launch without ever loading the web page. If not, Safari loads the web URL (which could be a simple redirect to the App Store).
Hijacking and malicious login token replaying are prevented by utilizing a universal link (HTTP or HTTPS) login interface and applying a random identification to validate the incoming login token locally.
Android Specific Security Issues
Reverse engineering with an APK or app bundle file allows the hackers to access our codebase quickly. We can implement the Pro Guard rules to prevent this. Any android application can use Pro Guard rules as a security shield. It essentially obfuscates your code. It's not readable if someone reverses and engineers it, which protects you from engineering attacks. Another advantage of utilizing Pro Guard is that it minimizes the size of the APK by deleting unneeded code and resources. If your project includes a third-party library, you can include its Pro Guard rules in your rules file.
The minifyEnabled property in the app/build .gradle file must be enabled to enable the Pro Guard rule.
iOS Specific Security Concerns
We'll discuss how we can prevent unsafe domains from being used on iOS. It will protect us against attacks on the transport layer. By specifying some policies in your Info.plist file, you can prohibit unsafe domains.
Let's talk about what you should put in your Info now.
There's a plist file for that.
Apple included a dictionary named NSAppTransportSecurity to iOS 9.0, which you can locate inside the info.plist file. The key NSAllowArbitraryLoads is set to NO by default in NSAppTransportSecurity, indicating that you have accepted security advantages. If you're working with a localhost or an HTTP domain, you'll need to set it to YES. Else, you won't be able to make the network requests with those unsafe domains.
Authentication Issues
The OAuth-2 authentication protocol is extremely common these days, and it is widely regarded as the most comprehensive and secure protocol available. This is also the foundation of the OpenID Connect protocol. The user is prompted to authenticate via a third party via OAuth-2. This third party returns to the requesting application with a verification code that may be exchanged for a JWT i.e a JSON Web Token — upon successful completion.
Security Issue
This redirect phase is secure on the web since URLs are guaranteed to be unique. This isn't the case with apps because, as previously stated, there is no centralized mechanism for registering URL schemes! An additional check must be introduced to solve this security vulnerability.
Security solutions to overcome this issue
We can utilize the SHA 256 cryptographic method as an enhancement to make the OAuth-2 approach safer by ensuring that the authentication and token exchange requests come from the same client. For a text or file, SHA 256 generates a unique "signature." The signature is always of the same length, and the signature will always be the same for the same input. Proof of Key Code Exchange is the name given to this entire procedure (PKCE).
SSL Encryption & SSL Pinning
Between the time it leaves the server and the time it reaches the client, SSL encryption prevents the requested data from being read in plain text. Even if you use https endpoints, your data could still be intercepted.
Security Issue
With https, the client will only and only trust the server if it can produce a valid certificate signed by a trusted Certificate Authority that is already installed on the client. An attacker may exploit this by installing a rogue root CA certificate on the user's device, which would cause the client to trust all certificates signed by the attacker. As a result, relying solely on certificates may leave you vulnerable.
Security Solution
SSL pinning is a client-side approach that can be used to prevent this attack. It works by embedding (or pinning) a list of trusted certificates into the client during development. Only requests signed with one of the trusted certificates are accepted, and any requests signed with self-signed certificates are rejected.
When utilizing SSL pinning, keep in mind that certificates can expire. Certificates expire every 12–18 months, and when they do, they must be updated both in the app and on the server. Any apps that have the old certificate incorporated will stop working as soon as the server certificate is updated.
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