Why is Flutter the Ideal Framework for Optimum App Security?

Flutter has already emerged as one of the leading and most popular cross-platform app development frameworks thanks to its integral capability to deliver standout native user experience, faster development through code reusability, faster app testing and deployment through features like hot reloading, and, most importantly, a good reserve of security tools and protocols to take app security to the next level.

Secure Your Applications through Flutter Security

1) Loopholes in User Authentication

This is still the most common and widely repeated security issue across mobile apps of all niches. Unauthorized access to the app is a key security threat for many mobile apps. There are two common approaches to dealing with this. First of all, the app security measure must ensure that every user is authenticated, and secondly, there should be a secondary safeguard to block an unauthorized user from doing further damage to an app once such an incident is detected.

Fortunately, Flutter offers robust measures to prevent such security flaws. Within Flutter, you can find several trusted and tested plugins for authentication that follow stringent sign-in and social login protocols leaving no room for unauthorized access. It is advisable to use one of these officially recommended plugins. For instance, when one needs to authenticate with Facebook, the official Facebook Sign in plugin should be trusted.

Good read: Understanding OWASP Top 10 Mobile: Poor Authorization and Authentication

2) Data Leaks and Data Theft

Instances of data leaks and data theft are steadily increasing, thanks to multiple device interfaces involving different data usage facets. An app needs to deal with multiple types of sensitive data, including personal identity, browsing and transaction data, financial data, etc. Since corporations are always after grabbing more customer or user data to derive data-driven market insights, data theft and data breaches are increasingly becoming common.

Flutter strengthens data security and actively prevents such data security risks by some measures. Let's have a quick look at these measures to protect data from manipulation and theft.

• Flutter comes with a dedicated plugin for shared preferences for every device platform, and this allows for providing persistent storage. Now, developers simply can avoid using these Shared Preferences for storing all kinds of sensitive data like financial information, password, PIN, etc.
• Every app uses an in-memory cache to store data locally in the device, which further exposes the data to security risks. Now Flutter developer can set a timer for clearing this cache every time the user concludes a session and presses the home button.
• Apart from the above-mentioned measures, developers can also use app-level encryption to bolster data security further. Flutter developers can access iOS SecKey API and Common Crypto library for using both asymmetric and symmetric encryption keys for the app data. Flutter code is written in Dart, and the language offers several cryptos and encrypts libraries with several cryptographic hashing and encryption functions.

Good read- How Flutter helps Reduce the Overall Cost of Creating Mobile Apps

3) Malicious Code Injections

Another major security threat common to many apps is code injection, which mostly happens through less reliable plugins. The code injections by getting access to the app database can inject malicious code, resulting in data loss, data breaches, data tampering, faulty app performance, and complete crashing of the app. The most alarming thing is that such attacks occur every once in a while, and common app security safeguards are not enough to prevent them completely.

Since third-party plugins are mostly responsible for code injections leading to security risks, using official plugins from trusted and reputed sources is the safest practice to prevent such attacks. In case you still have been facing such attacks, detecting the culprit plugin and offloading it or deploying additional code to prevent such an attack is necessary. In such cases, you obviously need Flutter security experts and developers.

4) Data Loss in The Network

Another way your app is often exposed to security risk is through network leaks and security loopholes in the network. HTTPS coming with a TLS or Transport Layer Security ensures optimum data encryption and authentication. Now, sometimes bad configuration of the TLS security parameters, including weak cipher suites, can cause great security vulnerabilities for the network connection.

The Dart: io library of Flutter ensures that the HTTPS connection is equipped with TLS Certificate Pinning and the HttpClient class for enhanced network security. Thanks to this, the HTTPS requests having custom trusted certificates can be maintained and managed by SecurityContext objects. Thanks to this, Flutter API calls can be protected with security features common in native frameworks.

Conclusion

For developing a highly secure mobile app equipped with standout security features, Flutter can be the best choice. Google built the Flutter framework keeping all the security concerns and flaws in mind. Flutter almost has the answers to most of the security challenges for modern apps.