Trending open source tools to test mobile application security

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enterprise mobile security

mobile app security testing

A larger percentage of modern users access both personal and business data on their smartphones and tablets. Therefore, users often look for mobile apps that keep their personal and sensitive information isolated and secure. It has also become vital for a business to perform a comprehensive security testing to ensure that the application is not vulnerable to mischievous attacks. Nowadays, as most of the mobile apps target multiple devices and platforms, the testers often find it daunting to perform security testing. So, for this reason, the testers need specialised tools with an open source touch to check whether a mobile app is 100 percent secure or not.

Mobile app testing can be quite cumbersome. To ease this process, businesses make separate teams for testing and analysing open source tools.

Some of the open source mobile application security testing tools are listed as below:

OWASP Zed Attack Proxy Project

It was developed by AWASP and is available for Unix/Linux, Macintosh and Windows platforms. Originally, the tool was designed as an integrated penetration testing tool for web testing applications.

OWASP Zed Attack Proxy Project is currently used by testers to access security of a wide variety of mobile applications. As the tool allow app testers to design and send mischievous messages, it becomes easier for the developers to breach the security of mobile apps by attacking the server-side resources through mischievous messages. Simultaneously, they can easily assess the vulnerability of applications by getting into engineering the communication protocols.

There are features such as traditional and AJAX spiders, web socket support and REST-based API integration to help developers easily test the security of mobile apps.

The OWASP project is one of the heavily maintained open source projects and is continually monitored and updated by a team of international volunteers. Testers are allowed to test, create and send the effects of security threats — providing real-time data about OWASP effectiveness.

Android Debug Bridge

Android Debug Bridge is designed to evaluate the security of mobile apps across many Android devices at the command line. This program can be used as a client-server and can be connected to emulators, in addition to install and debug the programs. As the tool allows the users to explore Android file systems, it becomes easier for the testers to identify security vulnerabilities.

Smart Phones Dumb Apps

Today, Smart Phones Dumb Apps (SPDA) supports both Android and iOS platforms. It is closely related to Google code repository. The scripts provided by the tool makes it easier for the testers to assess the security code of iOS and Android applications.

By offering source code-testing scripts, SPDA also enables the testers to identify the weaker pieces of code and make the mobile applications less vulnerable to various security attacks. It allows the testers to run static code analyzer (SCA) scans on the source code of Android apps written in Java programming language.

iPad File Explorer

This tool can be used for exploring the file structure of iPad apps. Not only this, but it can also be used for exploring the file structure of a wide variety of iOS applications. The third-party tool is designed with features to display and read app data apparently like normal file systems. The users can further media files and app data into two different views. As a result, it becomes easier for the developers to view and explore the file structure of iOS devices more clearly.

Many testers prefer to pick security testing tools to protect the mobile app from evolving security attacks. Also, it is always important for the testers to elite the security testing tools according to the nature and requirements of each app.

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