AC-Net: Assessing the Consistency of Description and Permission in Android Apps

• Main Authors: Yinglan Feng, Liang Chen, Angyu Zheng, Cuiyun Gao, Zibin Zheng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Android security; app descriptions; app permissions; consistency assessment; text classification; deep learning
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8694776/

With Android applications (apps) becoming increasingly popular, there exist huge risks lurking in the app marketplaces as most malicious software attempt to collect users' private information without their awareness. Although these apps request users' authorization for permissions, the users can still face privacy leakage issues due to their limited knowledge in distinguishing permissions. Thus, accurate and automatic permission checking is necessary and important for users' privacy protection. According to previous studies, analyzing app descriptions is a helpful way to examine whether some permissions are required for apps. Different from those studies, we consider app permissions from a more fine-grained perspective and aim at predicting the multiple correspondent permissions to one sentence of app description. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework for assessing the consistency between descriptions and permissions, named Assessing Consistency based on neural Network (AC-Net). For evaluation, a new dataset involving the description-to-permission correspondences of 1415 popular Android apps was built. The experiments demonstrate that AC-Net significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method by over 24.5% in accurately predicting permissions from descriptions.