Fintech Application Security

All fintech Apps must pass security requirements.

To protect users' financial data to achieve this, We should take care of encryption, blockchain, biometric, and two-factor authentication.

These applications must go through the Security Audits. The audits always help to find the security issues, for example, if logs are exposed while doing reverse engineering of apps, the security team can communicate to developers and the dev team need to use an extra level of protection. Apart from this, we can use other levels of protection as well.

*Mainly, we have to work on the local and remote levels of security*

Secure the API for security —

• Use token — Establish trusted identities and control access to services and resources by using a Token assigned to those identities.
• Use Encryption and Digital signature —Encrypt your data using a method like Transport layer security. Require signatures to ensure that the right users are decrypting and modifying your data, and no one else.
• Identify vulnerabilities — Keep up with your operating system, network, drivers, and API components. Know how everything works together and identify weak spots that could be used to break into your APIs. Use sniffers to detect security issues and track data leaks.
• Use an API gateway — API gateways act as the significant enforcement point for API traffic. A good gateway will allow you to authenticate traffic, as well as control and analyse how your APIs are used.
• Security with HTTPS and SSL (Transport Layer Security (TLS)) — This is used for encrypted communication between Client and server. For more info check the AndroidDeveloper site

2. Security With Data — This is the most important part of application development. We are storing the Data in three formats

• Internal Storage — by default, the files that we create are only accessible for our app, Android Implements this protection.
• External Storage — we can use encryption here
• Content Provider — The only way to share data between applications. CP is not included in the shared storage area accessible by all android packages.

Encryption involves mathematical algorithms that convert data into code that makes sense only to the intended receiver. Unauthorized users or hackers cannot decipher it without the correct decryption key. Therefore, even if they hack the data, they won’t be able to access any sensitive information.

3. Apply for signature-based permissions — While sharing Data between the two Apps, we should use signature-based permission. These permissions don’t require user confirmation and instead check that the apps accessing the data are signed using the same signing key. Therefore, these permissions offer a more streamlined, secure user experience

5. Implement Root Beer — We can apply a root check on the Device, so it should not open on the Rooted device. The root check library will use for a series of detection mechanisms to detect any apps running on the rooted devices.

6. Implement Proguard/R8 — R8 and ProGuard are the default application shrinker for Android provided by Android Studio that can secure our app against Reverse Engineering. Obfuscation makes it difficult for hackers to analyse the app’s code and understand the work of its algorithms

7. Сache strategy — Applications uses many default cache strategy, but most of them are not secure .here we can follow some steps to protect our data-

• Turn off the default cache entirely and use an encrypted database to save the data.

Or

• add the encryption to the default caching system.

8. Application passcode and biometrics — Passwords are still a popular authentication method. For fintech applications, this is the main part of the authorization. The system-controlled API provides biometric protection, It could be a remote passcode stored on a server and working as a regular password in web applications.

We can have more levels of protection for mobile or web applications. It's not possible to cover everything because every app's requirement is different, and we have to handle it according to that . I am always curious to understand the more options for Security

Please help me in the comment if you implemented something to secure the data which is not covered here…

See you in the next article...