Overview

If the app does not mask text input fields that contain sensitive data, such data may be visible to bystanders (shoulder surfing) or captured in screenshots and screen recordings. Marking a field as secure also keeps it on the system keyboard: iOS does not offer installed third-party (custom) keyboards for secure fields (see MASTG-KNOW-0141), so they never receive the typed characters.

This test statically analyzes the app binary for references to text input APIs and checks whether the app configures input fields to mask sensitive text entries. In iOS, masking replaces typed characters with bullet characters using the following settings:

Example for UIKit:

let passwordField = UITextField()
passwordField.isSecureTextEntry = true
// Alternatively, toggling the property
textField.isSecureTextEntry.toggle()

Example for SwiftUI:

SecureField("Password", text: $password)

Steps

  1. Use MASTG-TECH-0065 to reverse engineer the app.
  2. Use MASTG-TECH-0066 to look for uses of the relevant APIs.
  3. Use MASTG-TECH-0076 to analyze the relevant code paths and determine whether sensitive data is stored in the input fields.

Observation

The output should contain a list of locations where the app:

Evaluation

The test case fails if the app uses text input fields to input sensitive data and these input fields are not masked. This occurs when:

Note

It is not a failure if non-sensitive text input fields (for example, for a username or email address) are unmasked. Validating whether a text input field is used for sensitive data may require a review of the app's UI and business logic to determine the context in which the field is used.

Note

This test may produce false negatives if the app uses custom text input controls that do not rely on standard classes such as UITextField or SecureField (for example in custom UI frameworks or game engines, or if text entry is handled through nonstandard abstractions that prevent reliable observation of input traits at rest).

Saistītie uzdevumi

Saites
is related to MASTG-BEST-0044 Mask Sensitive Data in Text Input Fields (iOS)