mobile
Digital wallets security: Overcoming paradoxes and contradictions
Building secure digital wallets is a challenge when it comes to balancing between convenience and security while fighting the threats. How to build a reliable user-friendly product that meets user needs and effectively protects their assets?
How to prevent digital wallet fraud
Understanding digital wallet fraud is critical for designing and integrating an effective anti-fraud solution. Read about security events, risk models, remote device attestation, user authentication, KYC, trade-offs, and many more.
Exploring security vulnerabilities in NFC digital wallets
NFC-based devices, such as mobile digital wallets, contactless smart cards, and security keys (hardware authentication devices), are exposing users to NFC vulnerabilities in encryption, replay and side-channel attacks.
React Native libraries: Security considerations
How to select a secure React Native library for your app. Sort out improper platform usage, easy to misuse API, deprecated and abandoned libraries – check our research of the React Native ecosystem security.
Crypto wallets security as seen by security engineers
Read about building secure crypto wallets and issues we found when doing crypto wallet security audits. Hot non-custodial wallets store private keys, sign crypto transactions, and claim to be secure. But are they?
React Native app security: Things to keep in mind
React Native security: What developers and team leads need to know. Handle risks and threats, prevent typical security mistakes, follow best engineering practices — learn from our experience.
How to build OpenSSL for Carthage iOS
Imagine your builds going red because of an outdated OpenSSL that is used by one of your Carthage dependencies. In this story, we share scripts, error messages, testing matrix, and a working solution we used for Themis to prevent such a situation.
OpenSSL for iOS: tricks of OpenSSL semver
OpenSSL complexity starts with its version string. Apple, Carthage, and some dependency analysis tools have different opinions about it. Here is how we dealt with them and submitted iOS app to the App Store. So, we decided to update OpenSSL in iOS app # Themis provides easy-to-use cryptography for multiple languages and platforms. We implement it on top of existing cryptography engines , such as OpenSSL or BoringSSL, which Themis uses as a source of the cryptographic primitives.
Implementing End-to-End encryption in Bear App
Bear with us! 🐻 # The latest release of a popular note-taking app Bear contains a new feature — end-to-end encryption of user notes. Cossack Labs team worked closely with the amazing Bear team to help deliver this feature. We are rarely allowed to disclose the details of our custom engineering work, but Bear team was awesome enough to let us highlight some important aspects of work done for them.
Themis 0.9.6 release
THEMIS 0.9.6 RELEASE One release a week is good, two releases is better still. After releasing Hermes-core 0.5.1 PoC yesterday, following the good tradition of releasing on the 13th day of the month, we’re releasing Themis 0.9.6 today. The main feature of this release is adding support for OpenSSL 1.1. The rest of the update details are as follows: Docs: Significant update of the Contributing section in Wiki.
Themis 0.9.5 release
THEMIS 0.9.5 RELEASE Strategic planning, respect for traditions, and a consultation with our in-house astrologer led to an imminent release of Themis 0.9.5 on Wednesday 13, the 256th day of the year a.k.a. the International Developer’s Day. The update focuses on crystallizing conveniences, niceties and compatibility fixes that have been around for some time now. Here is the list of improvements: Infrastructure: You can now download pre-built Themis packages from our package server.
Themis 0.9.4 release
Why feel cold when happiness and laughter of your colleagues might make any evening warm and happy. Yesterday our team gathered to release Themis 0.9.4, and so did we. Take a look at the updates: BoringSSL support on Android and Linux Fixed some leaks and code styling problems (thanks to @bryongloden) Memory management updates for stability in languages, which rely on GC Fix Themis build errors under certain conditions Swift3 support + numerous enhancements from @valeriyvan
Introducing Themis 0.9.3
More than half of the year has passed since the last release and we have done a lot to make Themis better. Here is what we have updated: Infrastructure: Lots of new high-level language wrappers Enhanced documentation We have added lots of various demo projects Updated Themis Server Better make system verbosity (now you can see what succeeded and what didn't) Infrastructure to build Java on all platforms. Code: iOS wrapper now has umbrella header.
Crypto in iOS: Choose your destiny (Infographic)
Why do I even need to choose? When building your next app, you might realize that you need to encrypt the data. There are two main reasons for that: The need to transmit sensitive data to server and back; The need to store sensitive data. Even though there are multiple tools for doing just that, not all of those tools are equal. By just taking some random algorithm from CommonCrypto and using StackOverflow example to implement it, you'll fail.
Introducing Themis 0.9.2
For the release 0.9.2 of Themis, we did a lot of minor and a few major changes: Infrastructure: Much better documentation. Updated documentation reveals Themis Server, helpful associate for Themis library: a server where you can see current project status and try out different encryption techniques in your app with server as second party. Official tutorial will follow up soon. All platforms and languages are fully covered in tests now
Building encrypted chat service with Themis and mobile websocket example
Introduction Imagine you'd like to build your own chat server, which allows clients to exchange messages safely. You have a simple infrastructure consisting of a server written in Ruby and clients for iOS and Android. This is exactly what the famous Mobile websocket example provides. We have modified it to illustrate how simple it is to add security features using Themis. In this tutorial, we'll try to preserve as much of it's simplicity and architecture as possible, but add cryptographic protection.
Releasing Themis into public: usability testing
How we did usability testing for Themis when releasing the open source library into public. When we were ready to release Themis, we've gathered a few colleagues and decided to make a test run on unsuspecting developers - how would the library blend into their workflows? 1. Introduction While usability testing for user-centric applications has it's own distinct techniques, standards and frameworks, this is not so typical for a relatively complex and technical library aimed at developers and spanning multiple languages and platforms.