Mining Permission Request Patterns from Android and Facebook Applications

Abstract

Android and Facebook provide third-party applications with access to users' private data and the ability to perform potentially sensitive operations (e.g., post to a user's wall or place phone calls). As a security measure, these platforms restrict applications' privileges with permission systems: users must approve the permissions requested by applications before the applications can make privacy-or security-relevant API calls. However, recent studies have shown that users often do not understand permission requests and lack a notion of typicality of requests. As a first step towards simplifying permission systems, we cluster a corpus of 188,389 Android applications and 27,029 Facebook applications to find patterns in permission requests. Using a method for Boolean matrix factorization for finding overlapping clusters, we find that Facebook permission requests follow a clear structure that exhibits high stability when fitted with only five clusters, whereas Android applications demonstrate more complex permission requests. We also find that low-reputation applications often deviate from the permission request patterns that we identified for high-reputation applications suggesting that permission request patterns are indicative for user satisfaction or application quality.

Quantitative Security Risk Assessment of Android Permissions and Applications

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A Closer Look at Third-Party OSN Applications: Are They Leaking Your Personal Information?

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“…We then automate the process of application installation based on the Selenium WebDriver. 4 In particular, using several different Facebook accounts with distinctly different user profiles, we install and accept the requested permissions for each of the 997 applications. To monitor the application behavior, we use a modified version of a Firefox plug-in [7], allowing us to record all the HTTP and HTTPS traffic.…”

DroidMiner: Automated Mining and Characterization of Fine-grained Malicious Behaviors in Android Applications

“…A concern with these approaches is false positives stemming from the coarse-grained nature of permissions and the highly common nature of benign apps to over-claim their set of required permissions. Mario et al [24] presented their studies of permission request patterns of Android and Facebook applications.…”