User Centric Android Application Permission Manager

Abstract

Mobile malware has become a very hot research topic in the last few years, and this was due to the widespread usage of mobile devices all over the world. Like other systems, mobile devices are prune to different attacks that might invade user’s privacy and lead to private data leakage. Millions of Mobile application have been developed and used Worldwide, most of them are requiring permissions to work properly. The permission management problem is more apparent on Android systems rather than other mobile systems such as iOS. Some of these permissions might lead to successful security attacks on Android systems and hence lead to privacy leakage. To reduce the possibility of such attacks, many researchers have proposed mobile applications that help users to manage access permissions for their mobile applications. Most of the proposed systems lack the ability to profile users according to their preferences and do not provide automatic follow up with temporary granted permissions. In this research, we propose a User Centric Android Application Permission Manager tool called (UCAAPM), that provides an efficient and flexible way for managing permissions and profiling these permissions for each user, these profiles can be used on any Android device. UCAAPM will automatically follow up users permissions and grant/deny the permission on a scheduling basis defined by the user’s profile and according to his preferences. Experimental results showed that the tool works efficiently in terms of CPU, RAM, and power consumption, furthermore users are highly satisfied with using it.