From patient engagement platforms and care coordination solutions to holistic patient outreach solutions, building a healthcare application involves intensive processes including massive volumes of critical data exchange including structured and unstructured data. This blog is a deep dive into some of the healthcare industry’s proven best practices that help maintain highest standards of web and mobile application security. Read on.

1. Patient Data Collection

Analyze the Web/Mobile Application

• It is essential that you use a spider to mine the data and identify any possible missing elements
• Data leakage can be identified through server metafiles. For instance, DS Store, robots.txt, sitemap.xml
• Also, identify the caches prominent engines to verify accessibility
• Data leakage can also be prevented by verifying the webpage metadata and comments

Track Progress

• Consistently check the application design framework
• Verify the harnessed technologies
• Evaluate the user roles
• Decide on the points of data entry
• Ensure that the client-side scripts as protected
• Identify the multiple channels of delivery, including the mobile app, and web

Determine the Hosting Methodologies

• Ensure that it facilitates simple and secure management of third-party content
• Analyze the used ports and hostnames
• Identify and evaluate the co-hosted applications
• Verify all web services system

2. Effectively Manage Implementation

• Ensure that it facilitates simple and secure management of third-party content
• Evaluate administrative or application URLs that may be too common to be secure
• Check for files that are unreferenced, old, or backups
• Identify and evaluate all supported HTTP techniques and prevent the Cross-Site Tracing
• Evaluate file extensions processing
• Measure the impact of Rich Internet Application (RIA) cross-domain access
• Analyze and monitor the secure HTTP headers in place
• Track and monitor confidential data including login credentials and API keys involved in client-side script

3. Monitor the Privacy and Security of Data Exchange

Data Encryption Standards

• Evaluate the key length, SSL, and used algorithms
• Validate your digital certificates
• Validate that HTTPS is used every time usernames or passwords are shared
• Ensure the execution of HTTPS throughout the application
• Ensure that HTTPS is in place for all session tokens' delivery
• Verify the implementation of HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)
• Verify HTML5 web messaging
• Ensure that you use the Cross-origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

REST and Web Application Development

• Analyze the implementation of REST
• Cross-verify any potential issues with web services

4. Authentication Protocols

Identify the functionality of the application password

• Double-check the quality of the passwords used
• Confirm the functioning of 'Remember me' feature
• Ensure that that recovery, reset and change password functionalities operate efficiently
• Check the consistency of application authentication with other channels and shared authentication methods/SSO

How the authentication protocols work

• Ensure that unauthorized third-parties cannot identify the users
• Identify possible loopholes in authentication bypass
• Check the defenses programmed against brute force attacks
• Clearly define the functionalities of data encryption on credentialing channels
• Check the HTTP cache management (including Expires, Max-age, and Pragma)
• Ensure that the working order of user-accessible authentication history is in place

5. Check for Session Progress

• Cross-check the tokens in cookies, URL tokens and other session management methodologies
• Identify the cookie flags with session tokens including HTTP and HTTPS
• Check for the expiration pertaining to the session cookies duration
• Ensure that session termination happens after a maximum lifetime
• Post a relative timeout and log out, make sure that the session terminates automatically
• Check for the possibilities to start more than one synchronous session per user
• Effectively manage the login, log out, role changes, new session tokens
• Ensure consistent application of session management during the shared session management
• Identify the session puzzling
• Have a robust security maintenance for Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and clickjacking

6. Authorization Management

• Define the path traversal
• Check if the workflow has any possible missing authorization
• Check if malicious direct object references are happening
• Check if privilege escalations are present
• Check for possible issues with horizontal access control

7. Analyze the Algorithms

• Evaluate the possibility of unstructured algorithms
• Ensure appropriate usage of algorithms pertaining to the relevant context
• Analyze the randomness functions within the framework
• Check for the credibility of data encryption

To learn more on accelerating your healthcare organization’s data privacy and security, talk to our team