Detecting Stubborn Permission Requests in Android Applications

The Android permission mechanism is designed to protect the privacy of Android users. An Android application must request permissions when it needs to access sensitive data at runtime. If users do not grant the application requested permissions, the application would not provide functionalities related to these permissions. However, some applications violate this purpose in that they request permissions at initialization. If the user does not grant the requested permissions, these applications would simply exit, refusing to provide any functionalities, including the ones that do not require sensitive data. This behavior of stubbornly requesting permissions damages the right of users in utilizing non-sensitive functionalities. To address this problem, we propose an approach to detect this kind of permission requests. First, we model the key features of stubborn permission requests. Then, we identify the stubborn permission requests by statically analyzing Android applications. We evaluate our approach with real-world market applications and the experimental result shows that our app roach can effectively detect stubborn permission requests in Android applications.