Securing Modern Applications: White-Box Cryptography and OWASP MASVS in Practice 

OWASP recently released the OWASP Top 10:2025, the industry’s most widely used snapshot of the most critical application security risks. This latest edition shows a clear shift in priorities: Supply Chain Attacks have risen to third place, while Cryptographic Failures have moved down to fourth. The OWASP community survey also placed Supply Chain Attacks as the top-ranked category. This shift reflects a growing trend in the real world, as organizations continue to face breaches originating in third-party components and dependencies. Our recent discussion of Magecart-style attacks illustrates how quickly these threats are accelerating.

Nevertheless, strong cryptography remains essential and continues to hold its place within the top five security concerns. In a previous post, we examined how weak local storage practices can undermine even the strongest network protections. From WhatsApp and Slack to Microsoft Teams, several real-world incidents have shown how unencrypted data and poorly protected keys can lead to serious breaches. These issues tie directly to the Cryptographic Failures category in the OWASP Top 10:2025, reminding us that encryption alone is not enough – how it is implemented and protected is equally critical.

Why White-Box Cryptography Matters

As supply chain and Magecart-style attacks continue to rise, developers face increasing pressure to secure cryptographic assets against both external and local threats. This is where advanced solutions such as white-box cryptography come into play, offering a way to safeguard cryptographic keys even when an attacker gains access to the application environment.

To address these risks, Digital.ai’s new White-Box Cryptography Agent is designed to strengthen application defences across multiple OWASP MASVS control groups, including:

• MASVS-STORAGE
• MASVS-CRYPTO
• MASVS-AUTH
• MASVS-NETWORK
• MASVS-RESILIENCE
• MASVS-PRIVACY

By embedding cryptographic operations in a protected white-box environment, the White-Box Cryptography Agent ensures that encryption keys remain secure even if the application itself is compromised. This directly mitigates common MASVS-CRYPTO weaknesses, such as extractable or hardcoded keys, and supports MASVS-STORAGE requirements by keeping sensitive data unreadable even when local storage is accessed.

The agent also enhances MASVS-AUTH compliance through its sign/verify functionality, allowing developers to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of data and requests. This feature enables verification that messages or stored data originate from a trusted and untampered application instance, effectively mitigating risks of tampering and replay attacks.

In addition, it supports MASVS-NETWORK objectives by providing the capability to establish an additional encrypted layer on top of existing network protections such as TLS. This approach ensures that sensitive payloads remain confidential and verifiable, even if the underlying network channel is compromised or intercepted. It allows developers to achieve defence-in-depth by combining transport-level and application-level encryption, reducing the attack surface for man-in-the-middle and data injection attacks.

From a MASVS-RESILIENCE perspective, the agent is engineered to resist code lifting, app resigning, and app cloning, ensuring that cryptographic operations cannot be extracted or reused in unauthorized environments. When combined with Digital.ai App Protection, these safeguards form a layered defence that significantly strengthens overall resilience against reverse engineering, dynamic analysis, and repackaging attacks.

Our White-Box Cryptography Agent further supports MASVS-PRIVACY by ensuring that only the legitimate end user can decrypt their own locally stored data. Even if encrypted data is exfiltrated from a device, it remains inaccessible to others because decryption keys are tightly bound to each user’s unique environment. This ensures strong data privacy guarantees while maintaining user trust and compliance with modern mobile security standards.

Security That Survives Compromise

Together, these capabilities make Digital.ai’s White-Box Cryptography Agent a comprehensive solution for developers aiming to align with OWASP MASVS guidelines and build applications that remain secure and trustworthy, even under active attack.

As the OWASP Top 10 – 2025 highlights, the security landscape continues to evolve, with supply chain attacks and cryptographic failures remaining among the most pressing threats. These categories emphasize that application security must extend beyond perimeter defences and include protection for code, data, and cryptographic assets themselves.

By adopting solutions such as Digital.ai’s White-Box Cryptography Agent, organizations can strengthen their alignment with OWASP MASVS principles and build applications that maintain confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity even in compromised environments.

As attackers expand their focus to both the supply chain and runtime environment, resilient cryptography has become a fundamental requirement for modern software security.