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APEFS: An Infrastructure for Permission-Based Filtering of Android Apps

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Abstract

The mobile device market is booming. This gains among others from the growing of application markets for those devices. In Android the applications (apps) are controlled by permissions of what they are allowed to do. The problem here is that many users do not pay attention to these permissions because they are rather complex and the user is informed about them only shortly before installing an app. In this paper we present APEFS, an infrastructure that enables a user to filter apps by permissions before trying to install them. Thereby it simplifies the usage of the permission system by allowing users to think about security and privacy before even searching for an app. We also enhance APEFS to not only filter by permissions but also by possible information flows, using static information flow analysis combined with runtime assertions.

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© 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Meurer, S., Wismüller, R. (2012). APEFS: An Infrastructure for Permission-Based Filtering of Android Apps. In: Schmidt, A.U., Russello, G., Krontiris, I., Lian, S. (eds) Security and Privacy in Mobile Information and Communication Systems. MobiSec 2012. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 107. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33392-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33392-7_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33391-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33392-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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