On lightweight mobile phone application certification

Enck, William; Ongtang, Machigar; McDaniel, Patrick

doi:10.1145/1653662.1653691

Cited by 754 publications

(467 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Recently, the app's permission request pattern has been used to generate risk signal for warning potential malicious activities. Enck et al proposed a light weight application certification service called Kirin that uses a rule-based strategy to identify suspicious apps based on their requested permissions [16]. However, because the rules were defined manually, they can't adapt to the changing characteristics of current permissions and apps.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A reliable risk signal should be triggered by as many malware as possible, and rarely be triggered by benign apps. We compare the performance of DroidRisk with two state-of-art methods: Kirin from [16], RCP and RCP + RP CP from [24] using 10-fold cross-validation. The risk signal for RCP is generated with rule #RCP (θ) ≥ 1 which is the simplest one in [24].…”

Section: Reliable Risk Signalmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Quantitative Security Risk Assessment of Android Permissions and Applications

Wang

Zheng

Sun

et al. 2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. The booming of the Android platform in recent years has attracted the attention of malware developers. However, the permissionsbased model used in Android system to prevent the spread of malware, has shown to be ineffective. In this paper, we propose DroidRisk, a framework for quantitative security risk assessment of both Android permissions and applications (apps) based on permission request patterns from benign apps and malware, which aims to improve the efficiency of Android permission system. Two data sets with 27,274 benign apps from Google Play and 1,260 Android malware samples were used to evaluate the effectiveness of DroidRisk. The results demonstrate that DroidRisk can generate more reliable risk signal for warning the potential malicious activities compared with existing methods. We show that DroidRisk can also be used to alleviate the overprivilege problem and improve the user attention to the risks of Android permissions and apps.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Reliable Risk Signalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative Security Risk Assessment of Android Permissions and Applications

Wang

Zheng

Sun

et al. 2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…The work presented in [24] proposes a security framework that regulates the actions of Android apps defining security rules concerning permissions and sequence of operations. New rules can be added using a specification language.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk analysis of Android applications: A user-centric solution

Dini

Martinelli

Matteucci

et al. 2018

Future Generation Computer Systems

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Android applications (apps) pose many risks to their users, e.g., by including code that may threaten user privacy or system integrity. Most of the current security countermeasures for detecting dangerous apps show some weaknesses, mainly related to users' understanding and acceptance. Hence, users would benefit from an effective but simple technique that indicates whether an app is safe or risky to be installed. In this paper, we present MAETROID (Multi-criteria App Evaluator of TRust for AndrOID), a framework to evaluate the trustworthiness of Android apps, i.e., the amount of risk they pose to users, e.g., in terms of confidentiality and integrity. MAETROID performs a multi-criteria analysis of an app at deploy-time and returns a single easyto-understand evaluation of the app's risk level (i.e., Trusted, Medium Risk, and High Risk), aimed at driving the user decision on whether or not installing a new app. The criteria include the set of requested permissions and a set of metadata retrieved from the marketplace, denoting the app quality and popularity. We have tested MAETROID on a set of 11,000 apps both coming from Google Play and from a database of known malicious apps. The results show a good accuracy in both identifying the malicious apps and in terms of false positive rate.

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“…On the downside, it does not give the installer the option of considering all requested permissions at once in order to detect suspicious or unwanted combinations. The latter is usually a reliable indicator of malicious apps [24,25]. We are unaware of any publication that investigates this type of interface in terms of privacy-related decisions.…”

Section: Alternative Interfacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The simpler, the better? Presenting the COPING Android permission-granting interface for better privacy-related decisions

Gerber

Volkamer

Renaud

2017

Journal of Information Security and Applications

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One of the great innovations of the modern world is the Smartphone app. The sheer multitude of available apps attests to their popularity and general ability to satisfy our wants and needs. The flip side of the functionality these apps offer is their potential for privacy invasion. Apps can, if granted permission, gather a vast amount of very personal and sensitive information. App developers might exploit the combination of human propensities and the design of the Android permission-granting interface to gain permission to access more information than they really need. This compromises personal privacy. The fact that the Android is the globally dominant phone means widespread privacy invasion is a real concern.We, and other researchers, have proposed alternatives to the Android permission-granting interface. The aim of these alternatives is to highlight privacy considerations more effectively during app installation: to ensure that privacy becomes part of the decision-making process. We report, here, on a study with 344 participants that compared the impact of a number of permission-granting interface proposals, including our own (called the COPING interface -COmprehensive PermIssioN Granting) and two Android interfaces. To conduct the comparison we carried out an online study with a mixed-model design.Our main finding is that the focus in these interfaces ought to be on improving the quality of the provided information rather than merely simplifying the interface. The intuitive approach is to reduce and simplify information, but we discovered that this actually impairs the quality of the decision. Our recommendation is that further investigation is required in order to find the "sweet spot" where understandability and comprehensiveness are maximised.

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On lightweight mobile phone application certification

Cited by 754 publications

References 24 publications

Quantitative Security Risk Assessment of Android Permissions and Applications

Quantitative Security Risk Assessment of Android Permissions and Applications

Risk analysis of Android applications: A user-centric solution

The simpler, the better? Presenting the COPING Android permission-granting interface for better privacy-related decisions

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