A First Look at Firefox OS Security

With Firefox OS, Mozilla is making a serious push for an HTML5-based mobile platform. In order to assuage security concerns over providing hardware access to web applications, Mozilla has introduced a number of mechanisms that make the security landscape of Firefox OS distinct from both the desktop web and other mobile operating systems. From an application security perspective, the two most significant of these mechanisms are the the introduction of a default Content Security Policy and code review in the market. This paper describes how lightweight static analysis can augment these mechanisms to find vulnerabilities which have otherwise been missed. We provide examples of privileged applications in the market that contain vulnerabilities that can be automatically detected. In addition to these findings, we show some of the challenges that occur when desktop software is repurposed for a mobile operating system. In particular, we argue that the caching of certificate overrides across applications—a known problem in Firefox OS—generates a counter-intuitive user experience that detracts from the security of the system.