After this lesson, you will be able to: Walk the OWASP Mobile Top 10 with real examples, the mobile counterpart to the web Top 10, and recognize each category in practice.
The OWASP Mobile Top 10 is the canonical list of mobile risk categories. This lesson walks each with a concrete example so you can recognize them during a review.
Like the web Top 10, the OWASP Mobile Top 10 ranks the most common, impactful mobile risk categories drawn from real-world data. It is the shared vocabulary mobile security teams use. Knowing it lets you structure a review and communicate findings in terms employers and OWASP MASVS expect.
Improper credential usage (hardcoded or poorly stored credentials). Inadequate supply chain security (vulnerable SDKs and libraries). Insecure authentication/authorization. Insufficient input/output validation. Insecure communication (no TLS or accepting bad certificates). Inadequate privacy controls (leaking personal data). These map closely to web risks but with a hostile-client twist: anything the app stores or hardcodes is recoverable.
Insecure data storage (sensitive data in plaintext SQLite, SharedPreferences, or files the user can read). Insufficient binary protection (no obfuscation or tamper detection, making reverse engineering trivial). Security misconfiguration (debuggable builds, exported components, verbose logging). Insufficient cryptography (weak algorithms, hardcoded keys). These are where mobile differs most from web, because the attacker has the binary and the device.
Pick one.
Treating obfuscation as a substitute for not shipping secrets. Enforcing authorization only in the app UI, not the server. Storing tokens in plaintext SharedPreferences. Leaving debug logging in release builds. Trusting any TLS certificate (disabling validation 'to make it work'). Assuming the Top 10 is just the web list; the storage and binary-protection categories are uniquely mobile.
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