It is general myths among iOS users that iOS apps are safer than Android apps. You will usually find iOS users boasting about its security thing. But recent study busts this myths and shows how Android is bit safer than iOS.
The new study carried out by Checkmarx and AppSec Labs confirm that Apple’s the App Store is filled with various vulnerable apps. These vulnerable apps are more dangerous when compared to the vulnerable Android apps. While mentioning Android safer, we are considering critical vulnerabilities of apps. Critical vulnerability is one that exposes a major security risk of the app with direct exploiting point. These vulnerabilities do not need user involvement in exploitation. It these vulnerabilities exploited, it might cause major damage to your device or data.
If you check the above graphs, you can see that 40% of vulnerable apps in iOS app store fall in critical or high severity, but on 36% in Android play store. Percentage of critical apps is also higher in iOS apps.
Most of these security flaws are due to vulnerabilities in developers’ code. Number of mobile apps in different apps stores are growing faster but these apps are not up to the security level mark. App developers should try to follow better and latest security measures and start doing better penetration testing to publish secure app. Apple and Google both try to reduce the number of spammy apps from app stores but they cannot check each and every app for vulnerabilities.
If you are app developer, you must take this issue seriously. These are the few things you must consider:
- Integrate secure coding best practices into the development life cycle.
- Educate developers – Knowledge is a great tool, empowering developers to protect their own apps.
- Get your application code tested before its too late or too expensive to make a change.
- Don’t rely on external security mechanisms when you can develop your app to have internal resilience at the core
So, now there is one less thing iPhone users can boast about.
Source: CHECKMARX
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