Mobile applications carry tokens, customer data, and brand reputation. Yet many teams ship without a written security baseline.
Twelve controls every mobile app should pass
- Certificate pinning for production endpoints.
- Secure storage of tokens using Keychain and Keystore.
- Biometric step-up for sensitive flows.
- Root and jailbreak detection on financial and healthcare apps.
- Obfuscation of release builds.
- Tamper detection for in-app purchase paths.
- Transport security with strict TLS configuration.
- No PII in logs.
- Background screen masking for sensitive content.
- Server-driven feature flags for rapid response to vulnerabilities.
- App attestation for backend calls.
- Documented secure SDLC including SAST and SCA in CI.
None of these controls are individually difficult. The discipline is making them routine.
About the author. This article was written by the consulting team at Algorithm, Inc, a U.S.-based software development and digital transformation firm headquartered in Dublin, Ohio. To discuss how these ideas apply to your environment, contact us.