Spartan Jester: End-to-End Information Flow Control for Hybrid Android Applications

Web-based applications are attractive due to their portability. To leverage that, many mobile applications are hybrid, incorporating a web component that implements most of their functionality. While solutions for enforcing security exist for both mobile and web applications, enforcing and reasoning about the security of their combinations is difficult. We argue for a combination of static and dynamic analysis for assurance of end-to-end confidentiality in hybrid apps. We show how information flows in hybrid Android applications can be secured through use of SPARTA, a static analyzer for Android/Java, and JEST, a dynamic monitor for JavaScript, connected by a compatibility layer that translates policies and value representations. This paper reports on our preliminary investigation using a case study.