Case Study: How a Mobile Gaming Company Maximized Security Coverage with Mayhem

In the fast-paced world of mobile gaming, security is paramount. With hundreds of millions of players relying on a gaming company's platform, ensuring the safety of their applications and APIs is a top priority. 

This anonymous case study highlights how a leading mobile gaming company seamlessly integrated Mayhem, a cutting-edge developer-first app and API security testing solution, to tackle their security challenges effectively, maximizing code coverage, automating testing, and eliminating false positives.

“Mayhem finds things that engineers cannot see and helps us find vulnerabilities before the hackers do.” 

—Senior Technical Director

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The Challenge: Supporting Global Scale Security

Our featured gaming company is an industry giant, offering millions of gaming options to players worldwide with an extensive platform that facilitates online interactions, avatar customization, events, and user-created games. Security is a top concern for both developers and players.

The gaming company had three major requirements for their application security testing solution:

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1. Testing API security quickly and efficiently.

For a company with a vast array of gaming options and continuous interactions between players, ensuring the security of their APIs was extremely important. Traditional manual testing was not only time-consuming but also prone to human errors, potentially leading to overlooked vulnerabilities. 

The gaming company needed an automated security testing solution that could rapidly assess the security of their APIs, ensuring quick turnaround times for identifying and resolving potential issues.

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2. Mitigating risk from third-party libraries and components.

In today's interconnected world, leveraging third-party libraries and components is common practice in software development. However, doing so introduces a degree of risk, as vulnerabilities in these third-party dependencies can affect the overall security of the platform. 

The gaming company faced the challenge of mitigating these risks while maintaining the flexibility of allowing third-party developers to contribute to their platform by adding their own code. They sought a solution that could thoroughly assess not just their proprietary code but also the security of third-party components integrated into their system.

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3. Finding a unified solution for third-party components, proprietary code, and API security.

The gaming company’s need for both code and API testing as well as a solution that would cover proprietary and third-party components led them to search for a holistic approach to security testing that covered all aspects of their applications. They wanted to avoid fragmented solutions that only addressed individual segments of their codebase. 

A unified solution that seamlessly handled security testing for their proprietary code, third-party libraries, and API endpoints was the ideal fit for their complex and dynamic environment. A consolidated security testing approach would streamline their processes and provide comprehensive insights into the overall security posture of their platform.

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The Solution: Full Coverage, Zero False Positives

Faced with these challenges, the gaming company sought an automated security testing solution that could bolster their DevSecOps practices and elevate their security standards to match their global reputation. 

After extensive search, they found the perfect fit in Mayhem, which gave them:

1. A Comprehensive Security Testing Solution

Mayhem's versatility made it an ideal choice for the gaming company's diverse needs. By supporting testing for both APIs and code, Mayhem provided a consolidated solution that covered all aspects of the company's applications. 

This unified approach streamlined the security testing process, saving time and resources. The ability to address various security aspects through a single solution enhanced the efficiency of the company's security practices, fostering a more secure development lifecycle.

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2. Support for Third-Party Components

The gaming company's platform accommodates third-party developers. Mayhem provides a security testing solution that tests both proprietary code and third-party components, providing complete coverage for the company's software.

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3. Automation to Enhance Efficiency

Mayhem's unique strengths lie in its ability to identify both known and unknown Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) in binary code by analyzing the code's behavior under various input conditions. This powerful testing approach enables Mayhem to detect abnormal or unexpected behavior, indicative of potential security vulnerabilities.

With Mayhem's automated testing capabilities, the gaming company experienced a substantial increase in efficiency. With Mayhem's automated security testing, thousands of tests run every minute, ensuring that defects in the code are promptly identified. Self-learning algorithms continuously expand test coverage, targeting areas often missed by traditional static analysis tools.

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4. No False Positives

Mayhem’s automated triage and reproduction processes efficiently eliminate false positives, ensuring that the development teams only deal with actionable and relevant results. This saves valuable developer time, allowing them to focus on building engaging gaming experiences rather than getting bogged down with manual security testing.

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5. Continuity and Regression Testing

Mayhem's continuous testing capabilities ensure that security remains an ongoing focus during the development process. As the gaming company rolls out new features and updates regularly, Mayhem consistently assesses the security of these changes. 

This continuity in testing prevents new vulnerabilities from slipping through the cracks and allows the company to maintain a high level of security as they evolve their platform. Additionally, Mayhem's regression testing feature verifies that previously addressed vulnerabilities stay fixed, giving the company peace of mind that their security efforts are effective in the long term.

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Mayhem’s Impact: Empowering Developers to Focus on Creativity

Mayhem, the developer-first app and API security testing solution, proved to be a game-changer for the mobile gaming company. 

The company seamlessly integrated Mayhem into both their APIs and code pipelines, allowing them to achieve comprehensive security testing with exceptional speed and efficiency. Its ability to maximize code coverage, automate testing, and eliminate false positives significantly enhanced their security posture. 

By incorporating Mayhem into their DevSecOps pipeline, the gaming company's developers regained valuable time that was previously spent on manual security testing. This allowed them to focus on their passion—crafting captivating gaming experiences for millions of players worldwide.

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