Forgotten Essence of Backend Penetration Testing
White Papers
In recent years, certification, which aims to minimize security risks, has become more important, especially in the mobile application industry. However, certification compliance is sometimes still insufficient. This is especially noticeable when the solution’s functionality is split across different environments such as a backend and a client application. In this white paper, we will focus on such solutions and will try to answer why even certified and tested solutions still contain easy-to-find, severe security issues.
We will investigate the underlying causes of issues that often remain unnoticed during the backend testing process in an effort to learn how to mitigate them. This white paper is based on real-world examples and provides actionable steps to improve the security of your solution. This paper is most beneficial for Chief Security Officers (CSOs) or managers of software development companies, as well as those considering penetration testing as a part of their security evaluation workflow.
There are numerous methodologies, approaches, and certifications designed to ensure that a system is properly developed and tested and is considered secure according to certain criteria. Although these measures cannot guarantee that the system is secure, it is expected that such measures and processes will reveal the most trivial and severe security issues of the solution. Unfortunately, that is often not the case.
Security breaches bring damage to the product, customers, and the company overall, even if the product is certified. Why are hacks still happening to solutions that have a strong focus on security? To answer this question, we need to understand how modern backend evaluations are scoped and executed.