An overview of client-side security

We will start off by briefly discussing some core concepts that are involved in securing client applications, such as the apps that we are developing in this book.

Client-side security is a convenience

The first thing that you need to know about client-side security is that there really is no such thing as client-side security. The app that you deliver to your users, whether native or hybrid, is exposed to the possibility of tampering, reverse engineering, cracking, and a number of other things that fundamentally compromise its integrity. Thus, you can never really trust client applications with the important part of security in your app, which is ultimately required to safeguard your users' private information and make sure that unauthorized users cannot access data that they should not be allowed to access. In particular, this data is private and cannot be accessed by other users. In fact, many of the most severe blows in terms of security failures...