Event-Based Remote Attacks in HTML5-Based Mobile Apps

Abstract

HTML5-based mobile apps become increasingly popular as they leverage standard web technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript, CSS for saving development cost. Like web apps, they are built using JavaScript frameworks (e.g. jQuery) for making mobile websites responsive, faster, etc. Attackers may fire the events integrated into the frameworks for reusing sensitive APIs included in apps. Once the internal functions are accessed successfully, it may cause serious consequences (e.g. resource access). Its main advantage is that it is not required to inject malicious payloads for accessing to the system resources into apps. We define this vector of attacks as event-based remote attacks. In this paper, we present a systematic study about the event-based remote attacks. In addition, we introduce a static detection approach to detect vulnerable apps that can be exploited to launch such remote attacks. For the measurement, we performed the approach on a dataset of 2,536 HTML5-based mobile apps. It eventually flagged out 53 vulnerable apps, including 45 true positives.