Ensuring a secure connection from android app to web server

Question

I'm currently making an android application that will be used by a certain number of clients. Each client will have an account and will access information from the server.

My question is, how can I ensure that the requests sent to the server are only sent from my application?

Answer 1

I would approach this from two different angles. The first would be to only allow HTTPS communications on your server, this by itself does not protect your system from only communicating with your application, but it does protect someone from eavesdropping on your network packets.

With that covered, I would use an RSA Public/Private Key-pair to encrypt your https payload. Then on your server you can have the corresponding key to decrypt your data. Any communications that come in without the payload encrypted you can ignore and only trust data that comes in encrypted.