Fine-Grained In-Context Permission Classification for Android Apps using Control-Flow Graph Embedding
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 SepDisplayed 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 12mTalk | 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 12mTalk | 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 12mTalk | 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 12mTalk | 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 12mTalk | 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 12mTalk | DeepScaler: Holistic Autoscaling for Microservices Based on Spatiotemporal GNN with Adaptive Graph Learning 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 |