Suthahar Jegatheesan MSDEVBUILD / blog Multi-Stack Dev Build · by Suthahar
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Your Mobile App Is Leaking Its API Key

It's hardcoded inside the app — anyone can unzip it and read it.

What you'll learn

  • Why an app package is public the moment you upload it to a store
  • Why a key inside the app is already leaked, before anyone looks
  • How Azure Key Vault behind your own API keeps the key off the phone
Azure Security 8 steps 26 seconds —views

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Understand it one step at a time

The short runs these in order in about 26 seconds. Here they are written out — pick any step to jump the short straight to it.

1 Step 1 of 8

Your app calls Azure directly

To do that, it has to carry the key in memory at the moment it’s used — which is exactly what makes it recoverable from the package.

Frequently asked questions

Is an API key inside a mobile app actually secret?
No. An APK or IPA is a zip archive — anyone can extract it and read anything embedded inside in about a minute, including obfuscated strings, because the key has to exist in memory at runtime to be usable. Obfuscation renames classes, not the value of the key.
How do you keep a secret out of a mobile app?
Put the secret behind your own API instead of the app. The app calls your API with a user token; your API holds the real key in Azure Key Vault behind a managed identity, so nothing that ships to a phone can be unzipped for the credential.

Free app · no app store

These are built for a phone

Every short is drawn at full portrait height, the shape a phone already is. Installed, it opens full-bleed with no address bar across the top — and the whole library reads offline.

How it works

Read deeper on Azure

Twenty seconds gets the shape of an idea across. These go into how it behaves in production.

More shorts

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