Short paper: a look at smartphone permission models

Abstract

Many smartphone operating systems implement strong sandboxing for 3rd party application software. As part of this sandboxing, they feature a permission system, which conveys to users what sensitive resources an application will access and allows users to grant or deny permission to access those resources. In this paper we survey the permission systems of several popular smartphone operating systems and taxonomize them by the amount of control they give users, the amount of information they convey to users and the level of interactivity they require from users. We discuss the problem of permission overdeclaration and devise a set of goals that security researchers should aim for, as well as propose directions through which we hope the research community can attain those goals.