RmPerm: A Tool for Android Permissions Removal

Simone Aonzo, Giovanni Lagorio, Alessio Merlo

2017

Abstract

Android apps are generally over-privileged, i.e., they request more permissions than they actually need to execute properly. Prior to version 6 users can install an app only by accepting all its requested permissions, while newer Android versions allow users to dynamically grant/deny groups of permissions. Since some them impact on users’ privacy, we argue that users should be granted control at the granularity of the single permission. We propose a novel approach, which does not require any change to the underlying OS, allowing users to selectively remove permissions from apps before installing them, and with a finer granularity. We developed RmPerm, an open-source tool, that implements our methodology, and we present the viability of our approach via an empirical assessment on 81K apps, underlining that, in the worst case, up to 86% of the apps can execute without crashing when none of the requested privacy-related permissions are granted.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Aonzo S., Lagorio G. and Merlo A. (2017). RmPerm: A Tool for Android Permissions Removal . In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications - Volume 6: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2017) ISBN 978-989-758-259-2, pages 319-326. DOI: 10.5220/0006420203190326

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt17,
author={Simone Aonzo and Giovanni Lagorio and Alessio Merlo},
title={RmPerm: A Tool for Android Permissions Removal},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications - Volume 6: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2017)},
year={2017},
pages={319-326},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006420203190326},
isbn={978-989-758-259-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications - Volume 6: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2017)
TI - RmPerm: A Tool for Android Permissions Removal
SN - 978-989-758-259-2
AU - Aonzo S.
AU - Lagorio G.
AU - Merlo A.
PY - 2017
SP - 319
EP - 326
DO - 10.5220/0006420203190326