For years, Xamarin has been a popular choice for creating mobile applications using .NET. Xamarin facilitates the building of Android and iOS apps with a shared and common codebase. As with all mobile technologies, it is critical to protect Xamarin apps against security vulnerabilities that could be exploited in production. The Kiuwan platform can identify and fix issues early in our development lifecycle, long before its time to release to production.
How to Harden Xamarin Apps With Kiuwan
Kiuwan is initiated by running the Kiuwan Local Analyzer (KLA) in your development environment, build server, or CI/CD pipeline. When pointed at a source directory or repository containing our Xamarin app, the KLA scans for and analyzes all source code and configuration files within. A Xamarin project will contain predominantly C# source files, but there could also be HTML, JavaScript, or other file types. All in all, Kiuwan scans for security vulnerabilities in over 30 languages.
After scanning with the KLA, the results are organized and displayed in the Kiuwan portal — along with all the details needed to fix each vulnerability. In this Xamarin application, Kiuwan uncovered a potential denial-of-service attack, an Xpath injection vulnerability, HTTP parameter pollution, and several other security vulnerabilities:
Kiuwan Locates Multiple Types of Xamarin Security Vulnerabilities
While Kiuwan SAST focuses on vulnerabilities within our app’s source code, Kiuwan’s Software Composition Analysis (SCA) identifies threats from third-party dependencies. Third-party dependencies could introduce license risk, known security CVEs and CWEs, or obsolescence issues from running out-of-date packages:
After uncovering these vulnerabilities in our Xamarin application, Kiuwan’s Action Plans organize this work within our existing development lifecycle. For example, if there are only five hours within a sprint to devote to Xamarin app security, Kiuwan will identify the highest priority issues we can remediate within that time frame:
Xamarin App Protection Is Easy With Automated Code Review Tools Like Kiuwan
Overall, Kiuwan helps us to identify, prioritize, and fix security issues before releasing our Xamarin application to production. By shifting security left, we save time, effort, and energy, and continually improve the security of our app as part of any existing development process.Contact us to get started with code security scanning today!
