Forrester recently released "The Forrester Wave™: Bot Management Software, Q3 2024," in which it named F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense a strong performer and called out F5 for its mobile app protection, recognizing F5 as “the only vendor whose mobile SDK can extend into a mobile application shielding tool.”
What is mobile app shielding? Mobile app shielding combines several key features:
- Root and Jailbreak Detection: Shielding solutions include capabilities to detect whether a device has been rooted (Android) or jailbroken (iOS). Running apps on compromised devices can pose security risks, so these detections help in enforcing security policies.
- Anti-Tampering Techniques: App shielding employs techniques to detect if the application binary has been modified or tampered with. This ensures the integrity of the application and prevents attackers from injecting malicious code or modifying functionality.
- Environment Checks: Shielding solutions often include checks to verify the integrity of the runtime environment where the app is running. This can include detecting debugger and emulator environments, which may be used by attackers for analysis and exploitation.
- Malware Detection: Mobile app shielding includes runtime protection features that monitor the app's behavior in real time. It detects suspicious activities such as unauthorized screen readers, phony keyboards, and fake runtime environments.
Why do you need mobile app shielding? Mobile app shielding protects against several threat vectors that could not be addressed without it—all of which result in fraud, financial losses, and brand damage:
- Intellectual property theft and vulnerability discovery through reverse engineering
- Data leakage of sensitive data stored within the application
- Violations of security policies caused by apps running in rooted or jailbroken devices
Why should you choose a combined bot management and mobile app shielding solution?
Bot mitigation and mobile app shielding protect against very different threat vectors: app shielding protects apps running in an insecure environment and bot protection safeguards the APIs that mobile apps rely upon against threats such as credential stuffing, carding, gift card cracking, scraping, and unauthorized reselling. However, both involve mobile apps and so combining the solutions offers important advantages:
- App shielding and bot mitigation both require the integration of a software development kit (SDK) into the protected mobile app. Because each SDK adds to the size of an application, the fewer SDKs needed for security the better, and so combining the SDK needed for bot mitigation and app shielding offers value.
- Integrating security solutions into mobile apps requires effort on the part of mobile dev teams, who are usually quite busy. By combining the two solutions, F5 eases the implementation costs. Moreover, F5 provides a no-code integrator that can be tied into a dev team’s continuous integration (CI) pipeline, further reducing time and cost.
- By providing this combination of mobile security capabilities, F5 eases the burden of mobile security teams by reducing the number of vendors they need to work with and providing one partner for mobile security expertise.
Because F5 recognizes the importance of each of these attack vectors and the common building blocks of an effective defense, F5 partners with enterprise customers to ensure they gain the benefits of the most highly effective bot solution together with standout mobile app shielding.
To learn more, download a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave™: Bot Management Software, Q3 2024. And see DevCentral for demo of F5 Distributed Cloud Mobile App Shield.
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