Securing Your Android Keys & Secrets with Native C++ Code

Learn how to secure your API keys, Base URLs, and other sensitive data of your app through native C++ code.

Written by Wajahat Karim and Muhammad Ali

This article will guide you on how to secure your API keys, Base URLs, and other sensitive data of your app. Often times for Android apps, you want to keep secrets away from hackers or from any person who wants to reverse-engineer the app through an APK file. In this article, you will see some ways used by the Android devs to be secure and safe for your data.

There is no perfect protection mechanism to perfectly secure your data, applications, and systems from a passionate, sharp-minded hacker. So the only thing you can do in such scenarios is you can increase the security and use the best ways to be more secure. This will increase the hurdles in the ways of intruders and will take more time to sabotage the system.

Almost every app now uses some web services API. This is mostly enabled through any APU key or token. This key lets the server know that requests are coming from authenticated users and devices. Now, if you don’t keep these API keys secure, then any hacker can get access to this data through reverse engineering the APK file. This intruder can…