3 Effective Ways To Secure Your PhoneGap Mobile App

The ever-exploding use of mobile apps has made the business information more vulnerable to security hacks. While the developers leverage cross-platform technologies like PhoneGap to deliver faster apps, securing the PhoneGap/Cordova applications become more important.

As PhoneGap communicates with each OS by using different APIs, you need to secure your PhoneGap app development codes, documents, and enterprise data. Being a PhoneGap development company, you must follow the best practices mentioned below to secure your mobile app.

3 Best Practices For PhoneGap Mobile App Security:


#1 - Secure Your JavaScript: To keep your sensitive code into your app, ensure that you secure JavaScript as much as possible. As known, JavaScript is not compiled - so the best option is to obfuscate it to the extent it becomes unreadable. You must minify your JavaScript assets using Uglify before submitting your app to the app stores. You can even take it to the next level with the help of a paid service like JScrambler as it goes beyond obfuscation and offers more active protection for your JavaScript assets. While using Telerik AppBuilder, you can specify that some files exist only in debug or release configurations. Besides enabling you to manage your debug/release files, the AppBuilder IDEs also lets you automate the process with AppBuilder CLI and Grunt.

#2 - Load JavaScript Remotely: Another viable thing to do is not include your JavaScript assets in the app. Instead, you can load them remotely when the application starts:

However, this isn’t too secure as a quick scan of your source code can reveal your actual source. A better implementation would be to load the remote JavaScript through a secure API which first authenticates your user:
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "https://my-remote-endpoint.com/authenticate", // authenticate your user
data: { username: username, password: password }, // use the authentication parameters that are best for you
success: function (e) {
// check for a successful authentication, and if so, load the script reference returned from your API
$.getScript(e.scriptUrl);
}
});
You can also supplement it on the server by ensuring that only mobile browsers are trying to access this API. Even though it is really easy for someone to spoof a user agent, it cannot harm to add an additional check on the server. Also, secure all your API calls when necessary.

#3 - Limit Your Exposure: Some other ways you can use to limit your exposure to security threats are:
  • Reducing the access to core Cordova plugins to only the ones your app really needs
  • Avoiding Android Gingerbread (2.3) which is considered to be the most insecure Android version
  • Using the InAppBrowser Cordova plugin that uses device’s native browser security to keep the remote content separate from the app
  • Using the PrivacyScreen plugin to hide app content while switching between apps on iOS and Android
  • Using Touch ID Cordova plugin while developing an app for iOS 8 that provides secure authentication to users

When it comes to security, nothing is full-proof. So, start with limiting your exposure and adding as much sensitive data on your secured server as possible. Work through these best practices and keep your PhoneGap app secure. Also, leave your opinions about these PhoneGap app security best practices in the comments.