ASE 2023
Mon 11 - Fri 15 September 2023 Kirchberg, Luxembourg
Thu 14 Sep 2023 10:54 - 11:06 at Room D - Mobile Development 1 Chair(s): Jordan Samhi

Android is the most popular operating system for mobile devices nowadays. Permissions are a very important part of Android security architecture. Apps frequently need the users’ permission, but many of them only ask for it once—when the user uses the app for the first time—and then they keep and abuse the given permissions. Longing to enhance Android permission security and users’ private data protection is the driving factor behind our approach to explore fine-grained contextsensitive permission usage analysis and thereby identify misuses in Android apps. In this work, we propose an approach for classifying the fine-grained permission uses for each functionality of Android apps that a user interacts with. Our approach, named DROIDGEM, relies on mainly three technical components to provide an in-context classification for permission (mis)uses by Android apps for each functionality triggered by users: (1) static inter-procedural control-flow graphs and call graphs representing each functionality in an app that may be triggered by users’ or systems’ events through UI-linked event handlers, (2) graph embedding techniques converting graph structures into numerical encoding, and (3) supervised machine learning models classifying (mis)uses of permissions based on the embedding. We have implemented a prototype of DROIDGEM and evaluated it on 89 diverse apps. The results show that DROIDGEM can accurately classify whether permission used by the functionality of an app triggered by a UI-linked event handler is a misuse in relation to manually verified decisions, with up to 95% precision and recall. We believe that such a permission classification mechanism can be helpful in providing fine-grained permission notices in a context related to app users’ actions, and improving their awareness of (mis)uses of permissions and private data in Android apps.

Conference Presentation (conf_presentation_1.pdf)1.22MiB
Pre-print (ase_2023_camera_ready.pdf)2.21MiB

Thu 14 Sep

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

10:30 - 12:00
Mobile Development 1Research Papers / Tool Demonstrations / Journal-first Papers at Room D
Chair(s): Jordan Samhi CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
10:30
12m
Talk
Taming Android Fragmentation through Lightweight Crowdsourced Testing
Journal-first Papers
Xiaoyu Sun Australian National University, Australia, Xiao Chen Monash University, Yonghui Liu Monash University, John Grundy Monash University, Li Li Beihang University
Media Attached File Attached
10:42
12m
Talk
Enhancing Malware Detection for Android Apps: Detecting Fine-granularity Malicious Components
Research Papers
Zhijie Liu ShanghaiTech University, China, Liangfeng Zhang School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Yutian Tang University of Glasgow
File Attached
10:54
12m
Talk
Fine-Grained In-Context Permission Classification for Android Apps using Control-Flow Graph Embedding
Research Papers
Vikas K. Malviya Singapore Management University, Yan Naing Tun Singapore Management University, Chee Wei Leow Singapore Management University, Ailys Tee Xynyn Singapore Management University, Lwin Khin Shar Singapore Management University, Lingxiao Jiang Singapore Management University
File Attached
11:06
12m
Talk
How Android Apps Break the Data Minimization Principle: An Empirical Study
Research Papers
Shaokun Zhang Peking University, Hanwen Lei Peking University, Yuanpeng Wang Peking University, Ding Li Peking University, Yao Guo Peking University, Xiangqun Chen Peking University
Pre-print File Attached
11:18
12m
Talk
ICTDroid: Parameter-Aware Combinatorial Testing for Components of Android Apps
Tool Demonstrations
Shixin Zhang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanna Li Beijing Jiaotong University, Xi Deng Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jiwei Yan Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, Jun Yan Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Media Attached File Attached
11:30
12m
Talk
DeepScaler: Holistic Autoscaling for Microservices Based on Spatiotemporal GNN with Adaptive Graph LearningACM Distinguished Paper
Research Papers
Chunyang Meng Sun Yat-sen University, Shijie Song Sun Yat-sen University, Haogang Tong Sun Yat-sen University, Maolin Pan Sun Yat-sen University, Yang Yu Sun Yat-sen University
Pre-print File Attached