SecuRank: Starving Permission Hungry Apps Using Contextual Permission Analysis
Competition among app developers has caused app stores to be permeated with many groups of general purpose apps that are functionally similar. Examples are the many flashlight or alarm clock apps to choose from. Within groups of functionally similar apps, however, permission usage by individual apps sometimes varies widely. Although (run time) permission warnings inform users of the sensitive access required by apps, many users continue to ignore these warnings due to conditioning or a lack of understanding. Thus, users may inadvertently expose themselves to additional privacy and security risks by installing a more permission hungry app when there was a functionally similar alternative that used less permissions. We study the variation in permission usage across 50,000 Google Play Store search results for 2500 searches each yielding a group of 20 functionally similar apps. Using fine grained contextual analysis of permission usage within groups of apps, we identified over 3400 (potentially) over privileged apps, approximately 7% of the studied dataset. We implement our contextual permission analysis framework as a tool, called SecuRank, and release it to the general public in the form of an Android app and website. SecuRank allows users to audit their list of installed apps to determine whether any of them can be replaced with a functionally similar alternative that requires less sensitive access to their device. By running SecuRank on the entire Google Play Store, we discovered that up to 50% of apps can be replaced with preferable alternative, with free apps and very popular apps more likely to have such alternatives.
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