Every organization wants to get ahead of security, and security is essential for everyone. Having a secure system always helps you to avoid future problems with your customers.
These current advanced and different technologies that you use give lots of risks to build secure systems. But there are always best practices to prevent dozens of vulnerabilities in your app.
Developing a secure app can be a challenge. Customers expect apps to become available and updated faster than ever.
In this post, we will attempt to cover best practices for improving the security of Windows applications, as well as how Windows tools for developers can help you secure your apps.
Table of Contents
What is the best way to protect my application’s source code?
The better way to protect your source code – preventing people from stealing your ideas and implementation – is to use Delphi.
Developing the Best Developer Framework through Benchmarking – This white paper shows really good and real-world metrics of three different frameworks. The white paper includes:
- Delphi
- WPF with .NET
- Electron
Overall, it proves that Delphi offers high productivity and better security alongside great functionality.
Moreover, when Delphi VCL and FMX demo apps were decompiled, we can see that all the logic code was presented as an assembly which makes it hard to extract source code structure. While when C# WPF and JavaScript Electron demos are decompiled, the source code is easily exposed to a standard text editor.
Besides, if you are against reverse engineering of your Windows programs, you can utilize obfuscating tools. Learn more about obfuscating in this tutorials:
This shows that with, Delphi programming language with VCL and FMX frameworks, you can achieve high performance and better security over your application.
You can learn more about all the comparisons and metrics, be sure to check out these posts:
How do I get secure data in-flight?
Data-in-flight refers to the connection and the messages transferred across it. For instance, you might need to create a server & client application. In this case, rather than using third-party security protocols, you can rely on platform-specific protocols and layers. RAD Studio offers native and cross-platform Internet Client and Request components to create secure and reliable internet bases programs.
The use of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) ensures the security of the connection. This helps to block intermediary parties from accessing the connections.
How to create Single-factor authentication?
This kind of authentication is based on a single-user credential which is usually a password. If you are going to build your single-factor authentication you can learn the process here:
- The user gives a username and password to the identity provider. The provider verifies the identity of the user.
- The identity provider validates the given username & password. In most cases, the password is encrypted and provides additional security so that others can not read it.
- Then the identity provides return True or False that indicates authentication status
- Finally, if it is successful, the system gives access to the user.
What are the weak sides of the single-factor authentication?
The problem with Single-factor authentication is that passwords can be easy to guess. This can be solved by adding another layer of the requirement to get into the system.
For instance, applying secret questions and regular password changes.
How do I protect data on the user’s device?
Use an EDP Module.
Since we are talking about Windows app development, we are in a better place compared to the web environment. Microsoft Windows 10 and 11 offer Enterprise Data Protection (EDP). The EDP module guards enterprise data against unintended or malicious use and it provides 4 levels of protection: Block, Override, Audit, and Off. Learn more about the EDP module here.
How to protect stored data?
When you are working with stored data which is called data-at-rest, you can add encryption mechanisms to protect data. But the data integrity can not be completely ensured.
How to solve this problem then? Well, you can establish message authentication codes or digital signing techniques to solve this problem. For instance, the most common way is using either asymmetric keys or symmetric keys. Moreover, you can think about hashing.
What other things are there to consider about security?
Security remains a complex topic, you can explore and discover dozens of new ways every day. Operating system updates, technology updates always insert new features, and being able to understand and correctly applying them is another thing.
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