Mobile phones, not surprisingly, are one of the most important technological revolutions in the world today. The number of mobile phones in the world has exceeded the amount of people. Also, with technological advancement, people are more drawn towards buying the latest model mobile phones. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has declared mobile phones as an integral part of human life, a requisite part of their existence.
But as per sources, the revolution has just begun. The devices are getting slimmer, smaller and, useful than before. It is not just a device for kids but also for the elderly. These devices have made work a lot easy and commodities accessible. Designers are using mobile phones to sell their products and help them to target the ideal customers. Not only designers but brokers, financial managers, influencers are all working swiftly because of the mobile phones.
But more the technology, more the security threat. Even though the technicians make the apps with proper knowledge and care but there are always loopholes left. These loopholes are what give hackers the perfect opportunity to hack into your system and get all the essential information that causes a threat to your personal and financial information getting leaked.
What is RASP?
RASP is a tool used for protecting applications. It is a runtime application self-protection tool that potentially blocks malicious activities in the applications. It watches a company’s application at runtime, its behaviour and, the context of the behaviour. rasp security technology is capable of detecting and controlling an application’s malware, vulnerabilities, preventing real-time attacks and, controlling application execution. Since it is server-based, it is capable of detecting, blocking and, resolving any malware immediately.
Need for RASP security:
As attacks on business applications are rising and professional and confidential information is being stolen and used improperly, it has become quite essential to safeguard all the applications, some of which may harbour vulnerabilities that were not identified or mitigated early on within SDLC or various software security testing.
However in WAF, i.e. web application firewall only analyses the traffic in the application to detect any malicious activity, working according to static rules and is not capable of fending off newer forms of attack which it has never dealt with before.
Working of RASP:
RASP is a security technology that intercepts all the calls from the application and passes them on to the server to ensure its security. Whenever there is an unsafe call, RASP technology blocks it by either terminating the user session or denying a request to execute an application. It also provides the security team with timely and correct alerts into real-time malicious actions as they are taking place in the application environment and providing an immediate response even during the time of an attack.
Challenges faced during application security:
- With the advancement in technology, modern applications use complex formats such as JMOS, XML which require a variety of different protocols.
- Every application has vulnerability and is exploited during specific attacks that can be difficult to identify.
- Software is moving fast and with the elastic environment, resulting in quick deployment of APIs and leaving the application codes more vulnerable to attacks.
Benefits of RASP security:
- Lower false positives- False positives are security alerts indicating a threat when there isn’t. RASP makes informed decisions, based on contextual detection along with the static view and dynamic view i.e. application architecture and run-time execution. Because of these informed decisions, RASP gives significantly lower false positives. However, WAF security has higher false positives; it detects legitimate user requests as threats and generates false alerts. This leads to noise for an over-worked security team.
- Time and cost saver- Since there are no blacklists, learning processes or, traffic rules for configuration, it is easy to rely on RASP solutions. RASP immediately protects the software that allows the companies to launch their applications faster, thus speeding up the secure development cycle. Since RASP can alert on which portion of the application the code is being exploited and detect potential vulnerabilities in development, development teams are free to focus on other pressing matters. No training is required for RASP as it adapts according to the application vulnerability as it is based on application and not on a set of pre-defined rules.
- Easy maintenance- Considering there are no blacklists, learning processes or, traffic rules for configuration, it consumes minimal resources. They are frequently set and forget add-ons. Since it involves minimal work and is reliable, the operators are quite content with using RASP security tools. It makes the applications self-protected.
- Extensive visibility into run-time attacks- Rasp security alerts you about the vulnerabilities and determines which applications are under attack and solves the issues in real-time. This property of RASP security helps in providing the vulnerable code to the developers, hence they can use this information to modify the code-base and eradicate the vulnerability.
- Time to fix vulnerabilities- Considering that RASP does not require training, it gives time for the developers to create new applications and debugging the vulnerabilities. But when the vulnerabilities are discovered, it can take months for the developers to fix them which open a gateway for the hackers. Since RASP prevents any further attacks, it gives time to the security team to fix the issue without any pressure.
Various RASP deployment modes:
- Off mode- All the requests are passed without RASP interruption.
- Monitoring mode- Where RASP only monitors the requests and issues alerts.
- Block mode- Where RASP discovers the threats and blocks them.
As discussed, RASP security is essential to maintain the security of the applications and save the time of the developers. It is advised to test the RASP solutions before implementing them, to make sure that it does not create any performance issues since it works so closely with the applications. RASP security has empowered businesses to flourish as they provide the necessary time to the developers to create new applications by accurately detecting any threats and vulnerabilities in real-time.
