# What is Mobile Application Security?

> Mobile application security is the discipline of protecting software designed for mobile platforms throughout its design, development, distribution, operation, and retirement.

- Canonical URL: https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/mobile-application-security/
- Publisher: Yellow Cube
- Language: en
- Contact: hello@yellowcube.eu

## Content

It addresses how an app stores and processes data, authenticates users, communicates with services, uses platform features, incorporates third-party components, resists tampering, and handles privacy-sensitive behavior under the security constraints of mobile devices.

The work combines requirements, secure design and coding, supply-chain controls, static and dynamic testing, distribution safeguards, telemetry, and vulnerability response. Assurance should reflect the app’s data, permissions, users, deployment model, and threat environment rather than a universal checklist alone.

### Key points

- **App-specific controls:** Minimize permissions and sensitive local storage, protect cryptographic keys, validate inter-process communication, secure network traffic, and prevent credentials or personal data from leaking through logs, backups, notifications, or screenshots where relevant.
- **Lifecycle evidence:** Review architecture and code, identify dependencies, test installable builds on supported platform versions, verify backend interactions, and connect findings to release and remediation decisions.
- **Platform relationship:** Use operating-system isolation, permission, secure-storage, attestation, and update capabilities appropriately, while documenting assumptions about device state and supported versions.
- **Important limitation:** A conforming test result does not prove that an app, its backend, or the device is secure. Runtime state, business logic, compromised dependencies, platform flaws, and later changes can invalidate earlier evidence.

### Related terms

[Application security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/application-security/>) · [Mobile security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/mobile-security/>) · [Application programming interface (API) security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/application-programming-interface-security/>) · [Software composition analysis (SCA)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/software-composition-analysis/>) · [Authentication](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/authentication/>)

### Sources

[OWASP Mobile Application Security Verification Standard](https://mas.owasp.org/MASVS/) · [OWASP Mobile Application Security Testing Guide](https://mas.owasp.org/MASTG/) · [NIST SP 800-163 Rev. 1: Vetting the Security of Mobile Applications](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/163/r1/final)

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