Open In App

What is Application Hardening ?

Improve
Improve
Like Article
Like
Save
Share
Report

Application hardening is just almost like hardening systems, it’s possible to get all the functions or components that are not required, just restrict access and confirm the application is kept up-to-date with patches. Maintaining application security is extremely important because you would like to form applications accessible to users. Most applications have problems with buffer overflows in legitimate user input fields so patching the application is merely thanks to secure it from attack.

Why application hardening?

Here are some reasons why application hardening is important:

  • Application hardening is a crucial part of the protective business infrastructure on developing a secured mobile environment with a secure software development lifecycle process.
  • Determine what actions to require if the app is being attacked or a tool is decided to be compromised.
  • To protect user credentials enable your application to securely run in zero‑trust environments.
  • Prevent hackers from trying to examine internal values, monitor or tamper with the application.
  • Protect the application from a hacker trying to reverse engineer the application back to an ASCII text file

Does your application need hardening?

According to the application requirements, make a decision if it’s necessary to guard the application against hackers. For this use, various criteria’s also to make a decision like:

  • If the application has a property that’s cost-effective to guard.
  • If the application is accessing sensitive data of the user.
  • Application hardening mainly applies within the early stages of security decisions.
  • If your application contains financial transactions or your business data that you simply don’t want to be exposed to.

Applications today run on many devices in unknown environments. It’s hard to watch all of those devices and environments, putting your IP and knowledge you would like to secure beyond the control of your business. Application hardening also helps to protect business image; data breaches also can cause serious reputational damage to the corporate

Methods of Application Hardening

To protect our application from various attacks we’d like to use some methods to guard it a number of them are as follows,

1. Data obfuscation: The replacement of straightforward identifiers within the code by difficult-to-decipher alternatives. Renaming class names and variable names to other names. Use encryption to some code to avoid easy decoding by attackers. Binary level code obfuscation can be used to stop attackers from seeing a functional view of an application.

2. Anti Debug: A debugger may be a program that will analyze other programs while it’s running. A debugger could attach to the method of a mobile banking application and analyze the way it works. Usually, debuggers will do that by calling a debug API within the OS (OS). They’re going to also set some flag registers. To guard against this, an app should be ready to detect and answer the presence of a debugger.

3. Binary Packing: Binary packing may be a mechanism want to protect against static analysis. The application downloaded from the app store is encrypted and is merely unpacked at runtime making it extremely hard for static analysis to be performed.

4. Arithmetic Obfuscation: The conversion of straightforward arithmetic and logical expressions into complex equivalents expressions and make expressions difficult to readable by simple techniques.

5. Android Rooting Detection: Android device rooting allows an attacker to realize root access to an Android device. The successful rooting of an Android device may be a security risk to applications that affect sensitive data or enforce certain restrictions. Android rooting detection methods implement anti-rooting techniques to detect the legitimacy of the OS and execute security measures accordingly.

Benefits of Application Hardening:

Below is the list of some benefits of application hardening:

1. To avoid financial loss: If the application is accessing sensitive information of users or businesses then data breaches can cause the loss of millions to the company as result. If business financial information is employed by attackers then multiple actions are often performed by attackers it’s going to include selling information on the internet publicly.

2. Protect brand image: If a corporation repeatedly breached by attackers then it’s going to affect on company’s brand image in the future.

3. Improve software sales: Secure software could also be employed by multiple users with no effect on any security issue or minimal issues.

4. Reduce loopholes in security: Hardening adds to the varying levels of security to guard users and their servers. Hardening also removes disabled files and programs that are often forgotten about and supplies attackers with cloaked access to the application.

Application Patches:

Application patches are probably are available in three varieties: hotfixes, patches, and upgrade.

1. Hotfixes: These are usually small sections of code, which are meant to repair a selected problem. An example of the hotfix is that they could also be released to deal with a buffer overflow within the login routine for an application.

2. Patches: These are usually collections of fixes, they’re likely to be much larger, and that they are usually released on a periodic basis or when adequate problems are addressed to allow a patch release.

3. Upgrades: These are another popular method of patching applications, and that they are likely to be received with a more positive role than patches. The term upgrade features a positive implication- you’re moving up to a far better, more functional, and safer application.

For all these reasons most vendors will release upgrades that mainly contain fixes instead of new or enhanced functionality. Application patches are available in many various forms, they will be downloaded from the vendor’s internet site or FTP site, or they will be received on a CD.


Last Updated : 30 Mar, 2021
Like Article
Save Article
Previous
Next
Share your thoughts in the comments
Similar Reads