Make your mobile app GDPR compliant with Promon

Promon Shield for Mobile™ delivers deep, in-app protection that keeps your apps, users, and data safe from tampering, reverse engineering, and malware. It integrates post-compile in minutes, scales effortlessly, and stays invisible to users.

Challenge

What is the GDPR, and who does it apply to?

The GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation, is the world’s toughest privacy and security law. Passed by the European Union in April 2018, it strengthens and unifies data protection for all individuals inside the EU. It applies to all mobile apps that collect and process personal data of EU citizens, regardless of where a company is headquartered.

GDPR compliance requires constant vigilance. Companies must self-report all significant breaches within 72 hours, and each GDPR violation risks fines up to 4% of an organization’s annual worldwide turnover, or €20 million, whichever is larger.

More damaging than the fines is the reputational risk, which can have a negative impact on growth, customer retention and brand equity

Promon Data Protect™ protects sensitive data contained within an app
Proprietary EMVCo certified white box prevents data cloning and lifting

The GDPR and mobile application protection

The GDPR contains two articles that are especially relevant for mobile application protection, addressing app security and data protection for users:

Article 25: Data protection by design and by default.
Data processors and controllers are required to consider privacy while designing new applications, systems or processes that use personal data.

Article 32: Security of processing.
Application developers, data controllers and processors are required to implement necessary and sufficient organizational and technical measures to assure the integrity of processing data and deploy a level of security appropriate to the risk of breach, loss, unlawful destruction, or modification of data.

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Make your mobile app GDPR compliant

Stay GDPR compliant with these recommended measures to protect your mobile applications.

Root and jailbreak detection

Rooting or jailbreaking a device opens the door for malicious actors to access the application code, modify it, inject malware, or repackage the app. To protect your app from this, you should have robust root/jailbreak detection.

Strandhogg is an example of a serious Android vulnerability which can exploit both rooted and unrooted devices. Read more here.

Prevent application repackaging and reverse engineering

If an attacker gains access to your app code, they can modify it (for example by adding malware), repackage the app and spread it to trick users into downloading the illegitimate app in place of your original app. You should therefore take steps to protect your app code so that it cannot be repackaged. Another reason why you should protect your app code is to prevent reverse engineering to lift existing security controls.

Once Promon Shield for Mobile™ security controls are implemented, hackers cannot remove them, even if the app is repackaged.

Detection for keylogging and screen reading

Keyloggers and screen readers are types of spyware that can be injected into an app. They are used to capture input from the user, typically PII such as banking details and passwords.

Prevent scraping of data on the client device by hardening your app code – this protects your users’ credentials and blocks malware techniques designed to spy on user input.

Certificate pinning

When using SSL technology, data is encrypted through the operating systems. Relying on this leaves the door open for attackers to hook these functions in the operating system and get access to user data.

Employ certificate pinning to ensure that your deployed app instances are talking to a valid server at all times.

Secure sensitive app data

Securing sensitive app data is increasingly important when the app is released in commercial app stores. Storing sensitive app data within the app without proper protection can have huge consequences, and threat actors can reverse engineer the code and steal information.

When your app carries PII, you should go beyond basic security and add a white-box-backed software safe to protect sensitive information within the app.

Application shielding supports GDPR compliance

Promon Shield for Mobile™ provides comprehensive, multi-layered protection that safeguards your app from tampering, malware, reverse engineering, and unauthorized manipulation.

With post-compile integration that takes minutes and fits naturally into existing development workflows, Promon Shield delivers powerful, reliable protection without slowing your teams down.

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