With Android applications (apps) becoming increasingly popular, there exist huge risks lurking in the app marketplaces as most malicious software attempt to collect users' private information without their awareness. Although these apps request users' authorization for permissions, the users can still face privacy leakage issues due to their limited knowledge in distinguishing permissions. Thus, accurate and automatic permission checking is necessary and important for users' privacy protection. According to previous studies, analyzing app descriptions is a helpful way to examine whether some permissions are required for apps. Different from those studies, we consider app permissions from a more fine-grained perspective and aim at predicting the multiple correspondent permissions to one sentence of app description. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework for assessing the consistency between descriptions and permissions, named Assessing Consistency based on neural Network (AC-Net). For evaluation, a new dataset involving the description-to-permission correspondences of 1415 popular Android apps was built. The experiments demonstrate that AC-Net significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method by over 24.5% in accurately predicting permissions from descriptions. INDEX TERMS Android security, app descriptions, app permissions, consistency assessment, text classification, deep learning.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.