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Permission-Educator: App for Educating Users About Android Permissions

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Intelligent Human Computer Interaction (IHCI 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13184))

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Abstract

Cyberattacks and malware infestation are issues that surround most operating systems (OS) these days. In smartphones, Android OS is more susceptible to malware infection. Although Android has introduced several mechanisms to avoid cyberattacks, including Google Play Protect, dynamic permissions, and sign-in control notifications, cyberattacks on Android-based phones are prevalent and continuously increasing. Most malware apps use critical permissions to access resources and data to compromise smartphone security. One of the key reasons behind this is the lack of knowledge for the usage of permissions in users. In this paper, we introduce Permission-Educator, a cloud-based service to educate users about the permissions associated with the installed apps in an Android-based smartphone. We developed an Android app as a client that allows users to categorize the installed apps on their smartphones as system or store apps. The user can learn about permissions for a specific app and identify the app as benign or malware through the interaction of the client app with the cloud service. We integrated the service with a web server that facilitates users to upload any Android application package file, i.e. apk, to extract information regarding the Android app and display it to the user.

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Acknowledgement

This project was partially supported by National Science Foundation Grant Awards #1903419 and #1903423.

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Correspondence to Ahmad Javaid .

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Mathur, A., Ewoldt, E., Niyaz, Q., Javaid, A., Yang, X. (2022). Permission-Educator: App for Educating Users About Android Permissions. In: Kim, JH., Singh, M., Khan, J., Tiwary, U.S., Sur, M., Singh, D. (eds) Intelligent Human Computer Interaction. IHCI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13184. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98404-5_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98404-5_34

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-98403-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-98404-5

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