A mobile application penetration test is a step-by-step evaluation of the security of a mobile application. It is conducted through rigorous simulation of the conditions of an attack according to one or several established methodologies.

Mobile applications have become a primary target for cybercriminals, as the importance of mobile phones is constantly growing in the financial, educational, and public services industries globally. It compels the developers to be very attentive to the security of their mobile applications.

To check it, one would usually choose the offensive way of assessing the security of all the components of mobile applications or penetration testing, as it is the most efficient method to test resilience to real-world attacks. 

To conduct efficient mobile penetration testing you need to choose a reliable provider of the respective service with proven experience in mobile pentests, and employing ethical hackers with respective certifications, as well as positive reviews from the clients. The provider should be covering both the Android and iOS mobile application pentesting as these operating systems account for like 99% of the total market of mobile OS, and most likely, your mobile application will be targeting both Google Play and Apple Store. 

Benefits of Mobile Application Penetration Testing

Mobile application penetration testing requires a certain investment of efforts and resources however, it provides multiple benefits and prevents a lot of potential issues for the application owner and the end users. 

• Improved application security: mobile application penetration tests will help discover vulnerabilities and let the developers eliminate them before the exploitation in security breaches.
• Compliance requirements: more and more industries are creating or hardening further the security requirements to the mobile (and other) applications which should be met. Penetration testing reports would usually be an essential component of those requirements.
• Improved confidence: Having a mobile application penetration test report, and respective certificate, you prove to the partners, customers, authorities, etc, that you have taken required security precautions and your product is secure enough to be used.
• Cost savings: the identification and elimination of vulnerabilities to avoid security breaches will save you a lot of money on damage recovery efforts, fines, etc.
• Advanced security awareness for developers: penetration test, especially its remediation stage in coordination with the application security engineers, will educate the software developers in the area of secure by design software development.

Security and Compliance Standards

There exist dozens of industry frameworks, security standards, and compliance standards. They include OWASP MASVS, NIST 800-53, Google Play Data Safety independent security review, and many others. Experienced penetration testing companies usually develop their proprietary mobile penetration testing methodologies, uniting approaches and requirements of the numerous standards, MASVS, in the first place. OWASP MASVS is an industry standard for mobile application security and provides for seven areas in which the mobile application is to be checked:

• Security of storage of sensitive data
• Usage of cryptography for sensitive data
• Authentication and authorization mechanisms
• Data security during communication transits
• Security of interaction with other applications

• Best practices in coding and security updates
• Protection against reverse engineering.

These are the most common groups of mobile application vulnerabilities, and each mobile application pentest usually covers all of them unless, of course, otherwise determined by the application functionality or architecture.