How can you secure mobile apps with logging?

Choosing the right logging framework is indeed crucial for securing mobile apps. These frameworks should cater to the app's needs, offering features like encryption, compression, rotation, and deletion of log files. They manage the format, level, destination, and retention of log messages while handling errors or exceptions that occur during logging. Examples include CocoaLumberjack for iOS, Timber for Android, and Serilog for Xamarin. These frameworks streamline logging processes, ensuring security and efficiency in managing app logs.

The second step to secure mobile apps with logging involves filtering and sanitizing log messages before writing them to log files. Filtering entails selecting the appropriate log level (e.g., debug, info, warn, error, fatal) and logging only relevant messages. Sanitizing involves removing or masking sensitive data like passwords, tokens, or personal identifiers, replacing them with placeholders or hashes. This prevents exposure of sensitive data to unauthorized entities accessing log files, such as third-party services, cloud providers, or hackers, enhancing the overall security of the app's logging mechanism.

While sanitizing the logs we have to also kept one thing in mind that we are securing logs not from external communication also from the internal communication. Never use logging for passwords api keys. Try not to use logging in production environment for these all. Encrypt all the logs. Other than that things change by working of application to application so the security constraint and what data developers has to log also change.

The third step in securing mobile apps with logging involves encrypting and protecting log files from unauthorized access or modification. Encryption employs cryptographic algorithms like AES or RSA to render log files unreadable without a key. Protection includes applying permissions or access control mechanisms such as passwords, PINs, or biometrics to restrict access to log files. These measures prevent unauthorized individuals from stealing, tampering with, or corrupting log files, bolstering the security of the app's logging system.

Use secure ciphers of AES and RSA to encrypt the data. For example you can use RSA 256 for encryption. Try to encrypt all the data into private data into the sdcard because most of the times developers forgot to encrypt data which resides in sdcard.

For this we can use third party data deletion products which helps to overwrite the content of application with the assurance that it will not be recovered in future. You can add those product by implementing there SDK into your apps.