Monitoring and Controlling Access to Privacy Sensitive Resources of Android System

Abstract

There has been a significant increase in the use of Android platform in the last decades mainly because of the features that it offers, i.e., open-source architecture, a wide range of Application Programming Interface (API). For controlling access to resources and data, the android platform offers contains a permission management system. However, recently several third-party applications are found abusing the android permission system. Such applications misuse the granted permissions without user knowledge. Some of the researchers have proposed permission managers which revoke the third-party application permissions to stop the misuse. Although such security applications allow users to revoke the app permissions, however, it is difficult for the users to differentiate between a genuine resource access and a malicious access. In this research work, a security application has been developedthat presents useful monitoring information to usersto help them in deciding on which applications should be restricted from using the phone resources and data. It monitors applications' and systems' activities (e.g., process importance, screen on/off information) and calculates the corresponding risk to notify user about the resource access. If further enables the user to revoke the granted permissions to an android application by considering such resource access reports.