4

Steps to Secure Your Applications through Flutter

by
Andrew Adeyemo

Written by Andrew Adeyemo 2023

 4 Steps to Secure Your Applications through Flutter

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 deal 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.

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.
2. Every app uses an in-memory cache to store data locally in the device, which further exposes
the data to security risks. Now Flutter developers can set a timer for clearing this cache every
time the user concludes a session and presses the home button.

3. 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.

Written by Andrew Adeyemo 2023

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, and result 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 the network leak 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.

Written by Andrew Adeyemo 2023