In late January 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) enforcement focus on mobile apps. The enforcement focuses on “popular apps in the retail, travel, and food service industries” that don’t allow or comply with consumer opt-out requests.
A recent CCPA settlement involving Sephora cost the company $1.2m in penalties and obviously compliance with CCPA plus regular reporting to the AG’s office. We’re also seeing federal enforcement of mobile app privacy issues from the FTC, most recently with a $1.
In this post, I’m going to automate the build process (see my previous post) for a React Native Android app with GitHub Actions. This obviously ties into the the DevOps tidal wave but in a way that’s very developer friendly. Developers spend significant time in GitHub and have a great developer experience (DX). Instead of popping out to external systems, you can build, test and deploy you app within GitHub and also leverage the extensive, open GitHub Marketplace to reuse workflows and integration into other systems.
On Monday, Reuters released an article disclosing “Russian software disguised as American finds its way into U.S. Army, CDC apps”. In it, they share:
Thousands of smartphone applications in Apple and Google’s online stores contain computer code developed by a technology company, Pushwoosh, that presents itself as based in the United States, but is actually Russian, Reuters has found.
The article is a fascinating read, almost from a spy novel, including fake business addresses and even fake LinkedIn profiles of “two Washington, D.
If you’d like to generate an Android SBOM every time you build your app, you can combine previous techniques discussed on this blog to achieve this with GitHub Actions + NowSecure. If you’re not a NowSecure customer, first sign up for 10 free SBOMs so you can follow along in the tutorial.
To brush up on the previous techniques, check out my blog+video on how to generate an Android SBOM in CycloneDX format.
On 25 Oct 2022, OpenSSL began pre-notifying organizations of two critical vulnerabilities in OpenSSL 3.0.x. On the positive side, OpenSSL 3.0 had not been widely deployed and on 1 Nov 2022, the two vulnerabilities were downgraded to a high. However, on the heels of recent highly impactful vulnerabilities like Log4j and the devastating impacts of the OpenSSL “Heartbleed” vulnerability from 2014, defenders went on high alert.
Popular mobile apps with OpenSSL With the recent tutorials I’ve been sharing on Software Bill of Materials, I decided to take a look at 3,845 very popular mobile apps to see if I could determine if an app contained a direct or transient OpenSSL dependency and if so, was that version vulnerable.
Let’s walk through the steps on how to generate a mobile SBOM for an Android app and compare the results from a source code vs. binary analysis.
So that everyone can follow along, I decided to use the excellent open source note-taking app Joplin. The source code is available of GitHub and there are multiple flavors of the app including Android and iOS apps. The project also has a great article on building the Joplin applications which you can follow instead of the below directions if you prefer.