Abusing Android permissions: A security perspective

Abstract

The drastic increase of mobile apps and its direct impact on the security of user's device and data cannot be neglected. Such data nowadays is related to (almost) all life aspects. Even with the growing awareness to develop more secure apps, but still existed mobile apps found on app stores cannot be considered fully benign. This paper is giving a special attention to Android permissions and how they can be abused by security attacks. Most rated education apps have been selected to perform deep permissions analysis and categorization in terms of protection level and mostly abused ones. Moreover, the apps have been examined to check if they support advertisements or not. The results reveal that 80.3% of the apps are requesting permissions more than what they need and actually used. Consequently, such over-privileged apps would be exposed to serious malicious behaviors. The paper discusses possible solutions to overcome this issue and suggests possible ways to select the required permissions throughout the app development process.