A Testbed and Process for Analyzing Attack Vectors and Vulnerabilities in Hybrid Mobile Apps Connected to Restful Web Services

Web traffic is increasingly trending towards mobile devices driving developers to tailor web content to small screens and customize web apps using mobile-only capabilities such as geo-location, accelerometers, offline storage, and camera features. Hybrid apps provide a cross-platform, device independent, means for developers to utilize these features. They work by wrapping web-based code, i.e., HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, in thin native containers that expose device features. This design pattern encourages re-use of existing code, reduces development time, and leverages existing web development talent that doesn't depend on platform specific languages. Despite these advantages, the newness of hybrid apps raises new security challenges associated with integrating code designed for a web browser with features native to a mobile device. This paper explores these security concerns and defines three forms of attack that can specifically target and exploit hybrid apps connected to web services. Contributions of the paper include a high level process for discovering hybrid app attacks and vulnerabilities, definitions of emerging hybrid attack vectors, and a test bed platform for analyzing vulnerabilities. As an evaluation, hybrid attacks are analyzed in the test bed showing that it provides insight into vulnerabilities and helps assess risk.