Android App Classification and Permission Usage Risk Assessment

Abstract

With Android6.0, users can decide whether to grant an app runtime permission. However, users may not understand the potential negative consequences of granting app permissions. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using an app’s requested permissions and the intent-filters, app’s category and permissions requested by other apps in the same category to better inform users about whether to install a given app and the risk scores associated with granting each of the app’s required permissions. In an evaluation with 10,979 benign and 3,205 malicious apps, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal approach.