Pride and prejudice in progressive web apps: Abusing native app-like features in Web applications

Jiyeon Lee, Hayeon Kim, Junghwan Park, Insik Shin, Sooel Son

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

29 Scopus citations

Abstract

Progressive Web App (PWA) is a new generation of Web application designed to provide native app-like browsing experiences even when a browser is offline. PWAs make full use of new HTML5 features which include push notification, cache, and service worker to provide short-latency and rich Web browsing experiences. We conduct the first systematic study of the security and privacy aspects unique to PWAs. We identify security flaws in main browsers as well as design flaws in popular third-party push services, that exacerbate the phishing risk. We introduce a new side-channel attack that infers the victim’s history of visited PWAs. The proposed attack exploits the offline browsing feature of PWAs using a cache. We demonstrate a cryptocurrency mining attack which abuses service workers. Defenses and recommendations to mitigate the identified security and privacy risks are suggested with in-depth understanding.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCCS 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1731-1746
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356930
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Oct 2018
Event25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2018 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 15 Oct 2018 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
ISSN (Print)1543-7221

Conference

Conference25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2018
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period15/10/18 → …

Keywords

  • Cryptocurrency mining
  • History sniffing
  • Phishing
  • Progressive web application
  • Web push

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