Mobile Application Security

What Does Mobile Application Security Mean?

Mobile application security refers to a comprehensive security solution for mobile applications running on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. It is intended to protect personal or enterprise data stored in these devices.

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Techopedia Explains Mobile Application Security

Mobile application security involves examining the structure of mobile applications and studying how they work, as well as looking at major threat areas and what hackers or other attackers want to accomplish. Security experts develop assessments based on issues like theft of financial data or personal identifiers, or unauthorized access to devices.

Areas covered by mobile application security include threat modeling, source code review and risk analysis. Developers may look at areas like a database, cache or configuration files, or at the underlying platform to understand how to better protect mobile applications and devices from vulnerabilities.

In a sense, mobile application security is a kind of "next-generation" process based on security solutions intended for the personal computer. Like personal computers, mobile devices run on operating systems that have their own vulnerabilities and security issues. As mobile devices become ubiquitous, security experts are scrambling to catch up by developing mobile application security processes and solutions for the future.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…