Depth and Breadth Matters in MAST Tools

In our blog post, Sophisticated Simulation Still Isn’t Real - Just Ask Mobile App Developers, we continued to highlight the why mobile application security testing can’t be performed on anything but Corellium. In that post, we explored the limitations of simulators, and this one explores the challenges of mobile application security testing (MAST) tools.

Even the best MAST tools can’t offer the visibility required to find critical vulnerabilities. Enterprises need to integrate MAST for compliance and include mobile applications in their compliance audits as part of their cybersecurity resilience best practices. Compliance doesn’t equal secure.

Teams can check every box and still miss what matters if compliance isn’t built into your mobile app testing process.

Why MAST Security Testing Alone Isn’t Enough

A recent report from the CISO Society found that more than half of CISOs stated that compliance is not embedded into their CI/CD pipeline. But building in a compliant way is more critical than ever before due to the increasing number of compliance regulations enacted globally. Beyond national mandates, twenty U.S. states have introduced their own data privacy laws. Data security gaps in mobile apps put organizations at risk of non-compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

The risk extends beyond fines. Compliance failures can derail contracts, damage brand credibility, and drain millions in remediation and lost revenue.

Industry frameworks for managing these risks and testing for mobile app security are helpful but they are also challenging. Frameworks such as OWASP MASVS MASTG as well as CWE and CVE offer proven ways to identify risks, but applying them consistently can be time consuming and strain resources.

Manual testing for these risks can take time away from deep exploitation and vulnerability testing. If the testing time allocated is a week to 10 days, and half of that is spent manually testing for compliance checks, that leaves less time for the deeper analysis that is really needed. Tight application development timelines and time-consuming manual efforts can lead to risk in overlooked vulnerabilities or exploits, especially those for compliance.

Limitations of MAST Tools

MAST vendors and tools can’t access the root or kernel, which means they can’t observe the behaviors that matter most—how data moves, how protections fail, or how exploits behave at runtime.

Emulators and simulators can’t replicate those conditions, and physical devices are no longer viable now that iOS 26 has ended physical jailbreaks.

MAST security testing plays an important role in identifying basic vulnerabilities, but relying on it alone creates significant blind spots. Even the best MAST tools have critical limitations that prevent teams from achieving full confidence in their mobile app security posture.

Missed vulnerabilities. Automated scans often detect surface-level issues but fail to uncover deeper flaws like data leakage, chained exploits, or vulnerabilities that only appear in specific OS and device combinations. This leaves organizations exposed to security and privacy risks that only advanced or manual testing at the root level can uncover.
Black-box limitations. Many MAST tools operate as black boxes, providing results without transparency into how tests were executed. Without visibility into the underlying OS or device model, security teams can’t validate findings, reproduce issues, or test real-world exploit conditions.
Restricted OS and device mix. Traditional tools often run on a single emulator or limited physical devices. The end of physical iOS jailbreaks hurts app testing because teams can’t independently verify encryption at rest or in transit.
Static reporting. Static alone can’t answer runtime questions—what the app does with data, how defenses hold under attack, or whether patches truly work after release. Without dynamic evidence, status tracking, or pipeline integration, developers struggle to act quickly on findings.

For these reasons, MAST security testing should be considered a starting point—not a complete solution. To achieve true resilience and compliance, organizations need to augment MAST tools with testing on a virtual hardware platform that provides depth, flexibility, and visibility.

Additionally, many of these scanning tools only create a static report of findings, such as a pdf file, instead of being delivered on a dynamic platform that shows impact status and evidence of findings and remediation guidance that can be easily actioned and brought into development pipelines.