Fine-grained access control on android through behavior monitoring

Abstract

Google’s Android platform includes a permission system that protects privileged resources from applications’ abuse, such as Internet, Location, and Telephony. The permission system has great importance to the privacy security for users, but it is coarse grained that applications will have broader access than they actually require. In our paper, we design and implement a system with fine-grained access control of the privileged resources on Android. The system will contain two main modules: Behavior Monitor Module and Behavior Decision Module. The former will closely monitor the applications’ behavior such as attempting to access a user’s private data, send SMS, and access network. The latter will notify the user to make the decision for the application’s behavior and store the user’s decision. Experiments show that the system has a fine-grained access control through behavior monitoring.