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Article
Automatic, highly accurate app permission recommendation
Automated Software Engineering
  • Zhongxin LIU
  • Xin XIA
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • John GRUNDY
Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
3-2019
Abstract

To ensure security and privacy, Android employs a permission mechanism which requires developers to explicitly declare the permissions needed by their applications (apps). Users must grant those permissions before they install apps or during runtime. This mechanism protects users’ private data, but also imposes additional requirements on developers. For permission declaration, developers need knowledge about what permissions are necessary to implement various features of their apps, which is difficult to acquire due to the incompleteness of Android documentation. To address this problem, we present a novel permission recommendation system named PerRec for Android apps. PerRec leverages mining-based techniques and data fusion methods to recommend permissions for given apps according to their used APIs and API descriptions. The recommendation scores of potential permissions are calculated by a composition of two techniques which are implemented as two components of PerRec: a collaborative filtering component which measures similarities between apps based on semantic similarities between APIs; and a content-based recommendation component which automatically constructs profiles for potential permissions from existing apps. The two components are combined in PerRec for better performance. We have evaluated PerRec on 730 apps collected from Google Play and F-Droid, a repository of free and open source Android apps. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves the state-of-the-art approaches APRecCFcorrelation, APRec TEXT and Axplorer.

Keywords
  • Android security model,
  • Collaborative filtering,
  • Content-based recommendation,
  • Permission recommendation
Identifier
10.1007/s10515-019-00254-6
Publisher
Springer (part of Springer Nature): Springer Open Choice Hybrid Journals
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-019-00254-6
Citation Information
Zhongxin LIU, Xin XIA, David LO and John GRUNDY. "Automatic, highly accurate app permission recommendation" Automated Software Engineering (2019) p. 1 - 34 ISSN: 0928-8910
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/203/