On the Static Analysis of Hybrid Mobile Apps: A Report on the State of Apache Cordova Nation

Developing mobile applications is a challenging business: developers need to support multiple platforms and, at the same time, need to cope with limited resources, as the revenue generated by an average app is rather small. This results in an increasing use of cross-platform development frameworks that allow developing an app once and offering it on multiple mobile platforms such as Android, iOS, or Windows. Apache Cordova is a popular framework for developing multi-platform apps. Cordova combines HTML5 and JavaScript with native application code. Combining web and native technologies creates new security challenges as, e.g., an XSS attacker becomes more powerful. In this paper, we present a novel approach for statically analysing the foreign language calls. We evaluate our approach by analysing the top Cordova apps from Google Play. Moreover, we report on the current state of the overall quality and security of Cordova apps.