Development

Cossack Labs Mobile Security Score (CL MSS) is security framework for mobile applications. It focuses on risk-based requirements, continuous risk management, and measurable progress for enhancing mobile app security and sensitive data protection.

How to implement OAuth in the context of mobile applications while avoiding security pitfalls? Practical steps on fortifying OAuth flow with PKCE, state parameter, managing secure redirections, and focusing on critical aspects during OAuth assessment in mobile environments.

Ensuring security in cross-platform development with Flutter: Pros and cons, platform-specific security risks, fundamental security recommendations for using Flutter effectively and avoiding pitfalls.

Keep your code shipshape and reduce vulnerabilities with automated security testing. Delve into ways and tools of software security testing that developers and platform engineers can set up and automate to make apps more secure.

Cossack Labs stands with Ukraine and offers free security assessment and engineering services for Ukrainian companies to improve country protection and resilience.

How to select a secure React Native library for your app. Sort out improper platform usage, easy to misuse API, deprecated and abandoned libraries – check our research of the React Native ecosystem security.

All developers need to know about using OCSP and CRL for validating TLS certificates in Go apps. Things we’ve learnt while building our own OCSP/CRL validation tooling: design, implementation and security tips, example code and popular mistakes.

Understanding cloud security # In this article, we observe security responsibility of cloud providers: where it ends, what are the gaps and grey areas, and what risks security teams should take into account when using “as a service” platforms. So, you’re planning your new business in an area where security matters, and you start thinking about choosing your cloud provider to build your application on. Typically, you start juggling with a combination of all the nice building blocks you need and financial aspects you’re facing.

React Native security: What developers and team leads need to know. Handle risks and threats, prevent typical security mistakes, follow best engineering practices — learn from our experience.

Logs, audit logs, and security events are must-have components of a secure system, which help to monitor ongoing behaviour and provide forensic evidence in case of an incident. Let’s cut through complexity. In this article, we cover cryptographically signed audit logging, aka “secure logging”, when logs are generated in a certain way which prevents tampering messages, removing, adding or changing the order of log entries. We explain why signed logs are essential for security software, how we’ve built-in secure audit logging in Acra, and how to use it together with other defense in-depth layers in your systems.

Imagine your builds going red because of an outdated OpenSSL that is used by one of your Carthage dependencies. In this story, we share scripts, error messages, testing matrix, and a working solution we used for Themis to prevent such a situation.

OpenSSL complexity starts with its version string. Apple, Carthage, and some dependency analysis tools have different opinions about it. Here is how we dealt with them and submitted iOS app to the App Store. So, we decided to update OpenSSL in iOS app # Themis provides easy-to-use cryptography for multiple languages and platforms. We implement it on top of existing cryptography engines , such as OpenSSL or BoringSSL, which Themis uses as a source of the cryptographic primitives.

Understanding data security issues # The first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about security issues is typically some poorly written code that is prone to RCE, XSS, and similar attacks. But hardly anyone deliberately sets out with “I’m going to write some really bad, vulnerable code today!” intent in mind. Code is always written for a reason, driven by functional demands, culture, and processes. From a software engineer’s point of view, fixing a security issue equals removing an opportunity to exploit something.

Bear with us! 🐻 # The latest release of a popular note-taking app Bear contains a new feature — end-to-end encryption of user notes. Cossack Labs team worked closely with the amazing Bear team to help deliver this feature. We are rarely allowed to disclose the details of our custom engineering work, but Bear team was awesome enough to let us highlight some important aspects of work done for them.

Intro # Any set of security controls deployed in your infrastructure may fail. Given enough pressure, some controls will certainly fail. No surprises here, but the question is – how to build our systems to make security incidents less damaging in case of a failure of some components? How to prevent data leaks even in case of a successful data breach? Building security tools , we strive towards defense in depth approach.

Distributed tracing is incredibly helpful during the integration and optimisation of microservice-rich software. Before implementing tracing as a publicly available feature in the latest version of Acra, we did a small research to catch up with current industry standards in tracing protocols and tools. In this article, we’ve decided to explain, why tracing is a very useful thing and how you can benefit from using it in your projects.

Need for Docker image reducing To provide convenient delivery and faster deployment of our tools, just like everybody else − we use Docker. This article describes our experience of using containers for distribution of our product Acra (database encryption suite) and focuses on the method we used to reduce the size of Docker images approximately by 62-64 times. It’s not like we’ve made a revolutionary discovery, but as developers, we found it interesting to trace the steps from the moment of packaging a product into a container to trimming it down to a small Docker image.

Intro Like death and taxes, one thing that you can be sure of is that using C macros in a modern software project will cause a debate. While for some macros remain a convenient and efficient way of achieving particular programming goals, for others they are opaque, introduce the unnecessary risk of coding errors, and reduce readability. The criticism of macros is particularly acute in the wider security community. Among Cossack Labs’ engineers and the core Themis crypto library contributors there are people who previously worked on auditing cryptographic implementations of critical code.

This article was published in 2017 about R&D work, which resulted in stable production release of Themis. Intro In our ongoing effort to make Themis work with different cryptographic backends, we've decided to try something more challenging than just displacing similar primitives. This time we decided to make Themis work on Daniel J. Bernstein’s cryptography, as it is introduced in NaCl. What if one day it turns out that Daniel Bernstein’s assumptions about the rest of the world are correct, and everybody else is a lunatic?

Introduction On some cold winter night, we've decided to refactor a few examples and tests for Python wrapper in Themis, because things have to be not only efficient and useful, but elegant as well. One thing after another, and we ended up revamping Themis error codes a bit. Internal error and status flags sometimes get less attention than crypto-related code: they are internals for internal use. Problem is, when they fail, they might break something more crucial in a completely invisible way.

Intro As many of you know, Go is an amazing modern programming language with automated memory management. We love Go: we've used it to build Acra, our database encryption suite, we further use it to build other products. Not being extremely fancy, Go is practical and efficient and is a way to get things done in a reasonable timeframe. Sometimes, even in the age of modern, garbage-collected languages, with their own great profiling tools and well-thought memory management style, you'll still have to dust off old good valgrind to understand what's going on.

Why do I even need to choose? Warning: This article borrows a lot from our original Choose your iOS Crypto publication, so if you've read that one, feel free to skip ahead to the libraries and ending notes about the actual Android specificities. When building your next app, you might realise that you need to encrypt the data. There are two main reasons for that: transmitting sensitive data to the server and back

When we conceived Secure Comparator, we saw that it is going to be slightly slower than existing authentication methods, because: SMP requires much more rounds of data exchange each round involves expensive calculations our modification of ed25519 implementation involves blinding to avoid timing attacks, which makes overall performance even slower This is a consequence of different demands and different security guarantees Secure Comparator gives: let systems with zero shared information exchange requests to data, where request data itself is a leakage.

Why do I even need to choose? When building your next app, you might realize that you need to encrypt the data. There are two main reasons for that: The need to transmit sensitive data to server and back; The need to store sensitive data. Even though there are multiple tools for doing just that, not all of those tools are equal. By just taking some random algorithm from CommonCrypto and using StackOverflow example to implement it, you'll fail.

Intro While developing components of our products, we love to explore use cases and usability through creating real-world test stands.  0fc is a side-product of WebThemis research: while doing some protocol design for front-end clients with WebThemis services, we wanted to try it in a real-world situation. We've set ourselves a novel idea: end-to-end encrypted webchat, inclined towards client anonymity, giving zero trust to the server, built only with typical Themis primitives.

Introduction Imagine you'd like to build your own chat server, which allows clients to exchange messages safely. You have a simple infrastructure consisting of a server written in Ruby and clients for iOS and Android. This is exactly what the famous Mobile websocket example provides. We have modified it to illustrate how simple it is to add security features using Themis. In this tutorial, we'll try to preserve as much of it's simplicity and architecture as possible, but add cryptographic protection.