Practical Context-Aware Permission Control for Hybrid Mobile Applications

Abstract

The rapid growth of mobile computing has resulted in the development of new programming paradigms for quick and easy development of mobile applications. Hybrid frameworks, such as PhoneGap, allow the use of web technologies for development of applications with native access to device’s resources. These untrusted third-party applications desire access to user’s data and device’s resources, leaving the content vulnerable to accidental or malicious leaks by the applications. The hybrid frameworks present new opportunities to enhance the security of mobile platforms by providing an application-layer runtime for controlling an application’s behavior.

In this work, we present a practical design of a novel framework, named MobileIFC, for building privacy-preserving hybrid applications for mobile platforms. We use information flow models to control what untrusted applications can do with the information they receive. We utilize the framework to develop a fine-grained, context-sensitive permission model that enables users and application developers to specify rich policies. We show the viability of our design by means of a framework prototype. The usability of the framework and the permission model is further evaluated by developing sample applications using the framework APIs. Our evaluation and experience suggests that MobileIFC provides a practical and performant security solution for hybrid mobile applications.