SECURE DATA TRANSMISSION METHODS BETWEEN MOBILE APPLICATIONS AND REMOTE SERVER

Abstract

Number of mobile applications which manipulate sensitive data such as users’s identity data, financial data (for example credit card data) and confidential business data, is growing every day. Data transmited over insecure medium is exposed to various types of attacks. Therefore it is necessary to ensure secure data transmission. There are different security mechanisms at each layer of the OSI reference model. This paper analyzes security mechanisms at application and transport layer (HTTP Basic authentication, HTTP Digest authentication, HTTPS and message level security). Some of these security mechanisms provide restricted access to servers’s resources, while others provide secure communication that includes confidentiality, data integrity and authentication of communication parties. This paper contains several code examples, written for Android and iOS platform, with the sole purpose to illustrate the usage of mentioned security mechanisms.