Mobile app services are now creating a more convenient world, providing users with unprecedented innovation and convenience.

However, it is often very unfortunate that innovative services collapse at once due to events such as 'unauthorized withdrawal of money in the app', ‘credit card information leakage' and ‘personal information leakage' as a result of competitive focus on merely providing convenience of the service.

Through this post, we will be covering 7 essential security terms that can help you to succeed in mobile app services.

I hope this content will help those who are unfamiliar either with technology or with security in recognizing and preparing for the essential elements of successful app services.

1. Tampering

Tampering refers to hackers' unauthorized changes to mobile apps. The technology to defend tampering is called anti-tampering. Through tampering, the malicious users modify the service in purpose of using paid content for free of charge by bypassing the payment system or stealing confidential information of the service. In addition, the more serious reason for Tampering(Modifying) apps is that hackers often distribute those apps to unspecified people, or black market, which can result in fatal secondary damage to mobile services.

2. Decompile

​How are mobile apps created? First, a developer writes the source code.  Then, this source code is modified to the machine-recognized language and installed in the mobile. The decompile technique is to convert these apps (which are made up of machine language that only a computer is capable of understanding) back into a source code that people can easily understand. Since source code contains very important information in the service, malicious users analyze vulnerabilities in the service. In this respect, decompiling technique is used to steal important information that are embedded within the source code. 

3. Rooting
Smart phones have limited root (the highest administrator) account permissions to prevent users from operating the system at will. Therefore, 'root' can be a super user who can control everything in a smartphone by hacking into the administrator's rights.

Hackers root mobile devices when they decide this information is needed to acquire administrator rights to attack apps. 
In order to protect your service, it is important to detect whether your device’s rooting is on when the app is running. ​

4. Virtual Machines
Virtual machine is a type of software that provides a virtual smartphone environment on a PC. The original purpose was to allow users to enjoy smartphone applications on PCs, but hackers are using them as a means of hacking.

NOX, Bluestacks, etc. are main examples of virtual machine tools.  ​

In the next posting, we'll cover Debugging, Code Obfuscation and Code Encryption!

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