Case Study

Securing a Wearable Heart Rate Monitoring App

Client Overview

  • Industry: Health Technology
  • Product: Wearable-integrated heart rate monitoring mobile application
  • Users: Fitness consumers and wellness professionals

A health-tech startup launched a mobile application that connects with wearable devices to monitor users’ heart rates. Despite gaining early traction, the platform faced critical concerns related to data protection, insecure communications, and API abuse—posing risks to user trust, regulatory compliance, and system integrity.

Problem Statement

  • Unsecured Local Data: Heart rate data was stored in plain text on the device’s local cache.
  • Insecure API Communication: Some backend endpoints fell back to unencrypted HTTP, exposing data in transit.
  • Weak Authentication Controls: The API lacked strong session validation, enabling potential data spoofing and unauthorized access.
  • Crash and Sync Failures: While partly functional in nature, app crashes and sync delays raised data consistency and tampering concerns.

With the app handling sensitive biometric information, these issues posed a significant risk of data breach and non-compliance with GDPR and health data regulations.

Cybersecurity-Driven Solution by Aiyanaar

Aiyanaar deployed a security-first remediation strategy, integrating secure coding practices, compliance-aligned encryption, and threat mitigation across the mobile and backend ecosystem.

01.

Security Architecture Review and Code Audit

  • Conducted static code analysis to inspect insecure local storage and hardcoded secrets.
  • Performed dynamic testing to simulate man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and API abuse scenarios.
03.

API and Identity Protection

Robust API Authentication:

  • Introduced JWT-based access control with token expiration and renewal.
  • Implemented HMAC signing of sensitive request payloads to prevent tampering.

Input and Session Validation:

  • Enforced server-side input validation to eliminate injection vectors.
  • Established re-authentication requirements after prolonged inactivity (session timeout logic).
  • Monitored API request patterns for anomaly detection (e.g., spoofed device headers or repeated token reuse).
02.

Data Protection Enhancements

Secure Local Storage:

  • Migrated all sensitive data storage to the device's secure keystore/keychain (Android Keystore, iOS Keychain).
  • Disabled local caching of biometric data unless encrypted using AES with device-specific keys.

Encrypted Data-in-Transit:

  • Enforced HTTPS with TLS 1.2+ for all API traffic.
  • Deprecated all legacy or fallback HTTP endpoints.
  • Implemented certificate pinning to prevent MitM attacks on client-server communications.
04.

Security-Integrated CI/CD and Runtime Monitoring

  • Embedded security scans into the CI/CD pipeline to catch future vulnerabilities before deployment.
  • Built a real-time monitoring dashboard to track
  • Authentication failures
  • API misuse
  • Encryption enforcement violations
  • Data transmission anomalies
  • Included crash tracing with anonymized diagnostic data, ensuring user privacy while enabling forensic analysis of production issues.

Impact

  • Data Security: Eliminated plaintext data exposure; all heart rate information is now securely encrypted and stored.
  • Communication Security: 100% of API traffic now encrypted via TLS; MitM vulnerabilities fully mitigated.
  • Access Control: API spoofing and unauthorized data manipulation risks eliminated with token-based session management and HMAC validation.
  • Compliance: Fully aligned with GDPR, HIPAA (where applicable), and industry best practices for health data handling.
  • User Confidence: Post-patch analytics showed a marked improvement in user feedback and app store ratings related to security.

Reusability and Security Framework Adoption

Aiyanaar’s security solution framework was adapted and reused in:

  • A corporate wellness platform, integrating heart stress and biometric tracking under enterprise-level security policies.
  • A clinical trial companion app, where biometric data integrity and privacy are legally critical.

In both cases, the security-first architecture ensured data traceability, access control, and encryption-at-rest and in-transit—critical for regulated health environments.

Conclusion

This case demonstrates that robust cybersecurity practices are not just necessary for compliance—they are essential for building user trust, product reliability, and long-term platform scalability. Aiyanaar’s proactive security interventions transformed a vulnerable health-tech application into a secure, standards-compliant solution ready for clinical and commercial scale.

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