Detecting Permission Over-Claim in Android Applications

Abstract

Android devices have become very popular nowadays due to their rich functionality and good performance. To give the users better functionality, Android has introduced a permission model allowing developers to access the resources and information of the device with the user’s permission. However, few developers over-claim the permission that has nothing to do with the apps’ functionality. By using over-claim permission, many android apps may steal sensitive information from users, which is one of the leading privacy issues. Looking towards its criticality, we have started working on detecting overclaim permission. Detecting the over-claim permission is done in a variety of ways. In our proposed methodology the semantic analysis is done for the sentences of the permission description and the app description. The analysis is done using sentence transformer, sentence similarity using Space and universal sentence encoder technique. Also keyword based analysis is done to find out if the given keyword that is related to permission is present in the app description or not.