A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Android Runtime-Permission Rationale Messages

After Android 6.0 introduces the runtime-permission system, many apps provide runtime-permission-group rationales for the users to better understand the permissions requested by the apps. To understand the patterns of rationales and to what extent the rationales can improve the users' understanding of the purposes of requesting permission groups, we conduct a large-scale measurement study on five aspects of runtime rationales. We have five main findings: (1) less than 25% apps under study provide rationales; (2) for permission-group purposes that are difficult to understand, the proportions of apps that provide rationales are even lower; (3) the purposes stated in a significant proportion of rationales are incorrect; (4) a large proportion of customized rationales do not provide more information than the default permission-requesting message of Android; (5) apps that provide rationales are more likely to explain the same permission group's purposes in their descriptions than apps that do not provide rationales. We further discuss important implications from these findings

[1]  Byung-Gon Chun,et al.  TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones , 2010, OSDI.

[2]  Ziming Zhao,et al.  RiskMon: continuous and automated risk assessment of mobile applications , 2014, CODASPY '14.

[3]  Tao Xie,et al.  AppContext: Differentiating Malicious and Benign Mobile App Behaviors Using Context , 2015, 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering.

[4]  Helen J. Wang,et al.  User-Driven Access Control: Rethinking Permission Granting in Modern Operating Systems , 2012, 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[5]  Alessandra Gorla,et al.  Checking app behavior against app descriptions , 2014, ICSE.

[6]  Matthew Smith,et al.  Sorry, I Don't Get It: An Analysis of Warning Message Texts , 2013, Financial Cryptography Workshops.

[7]  David A. Wagner,et al.  The Feasibility of Dynamically Granted Permissions: Aligning Mobile Privacy with User Preferences , 2017, 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP).

[8]  Robin Sommer,et al.  Here's my cert, so trust me, maybe?: understanding TLS errors on the web , 2013, WWW.

[9]  Dawn Xiaodong Song,et al.  Contextual Policy Enforcement in Android Applications with Permission Event Graphs , 2013, NDSS.

[10]  Jeffrey S. Foster,et al.  User Comfort with Android Background Resource Accesses in Different Contexts , 2018, SOUPS @ USENIX Security Symposium.

[11]  Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan,et al.  SmarPer: Context-Aware and Automatic Runtime-Permissions for Mobile Devices , 2017, 2017 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP).

[12]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  Your Location has been Shared 5,398 Times!: A Field Study on Mobile App Privacy Nudging , 2015, CHI.

[13]  Tonya L Smith-Jackson,et al.  Research-based guidelines for warning design and evaluation. , 2002, Applied ergonomics.

[14]  Peng Wang,et al.  AsDroid: detecting stealthy behaviors in Android applications by user interface and program behavior contradiction , 2014, ICSE.

[15]  Yoon Kim,et al.  Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification , 2014, EMNLP.

[16]  Steve Hanna,et al.  Android permissions demystified , 2011, CCS '11.

[17]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  A Design Space for Effective Privacy Notices , 2015, SOUPS.

[18]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  A Conundrum of Permissions: Installing Applications on an Android Smartphone , 2012, Financial Cryptography Workshops.

[19]  Yao Guo,et al.  PERUIM: understanding mobile application privacy with permission-UI mapping , 2016, UbiComp.

[20]  David A. Wagner,et al.  The effect of developer-specified explanations for permission requests on smartphone user behavior , 2014, CHI.

[21]  Norman M. Sadeh,et al.  Modeling Users' Mobile App Privacy Preferences: Restoring Usability in a Sea of Permission Settings , 2014, SOUPS.

[22]  Dengfeng Li,et al.  UiRef: analysis of sensitive user inputs in Android applications , 2017, WISEC.

[23]  Zhen Huang,et al.  PScout: analyzing the Android permission specification , 2012, CCS.

[24]  Tao Xie,et al.  Mining Android App Descriptions for Permission Requirements Recommendation , 2018, 2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE).

[25]  Norman M. Sadeh,et al.  Expectation and purpose: understanding users' mental models of mobile app privacy through crowdsourcing , 2012, UbiComp.

[26]  Zhong Chen,et al.  AutoCog: Measuring the Description-to-permission Fidelity in Android Applications , 2014, CCS.

[27]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  Privacy as part of the app decision-making process , 2013, CHI.

[28]  David A. Wagner,et al.  Android permissions: user attention, comprehension, and behavior , 2012, SOUPS.

[29]  Tao Xie,et al.  WHYPER: Towards Automating Risk Assessment of Mobile Applications , 2013, USENIX Security Symposium.

[30]  Nina Taft,et al.  Exploring decision making with Android's runtime permission dialogs using in-context surveys , 2017, SOUPS.

[31]  Daniel Votipka,et al.  User Interactions and Permission Use on Android , 2017, CHI.

[32]  Christopher D. Manning,et al.  Incorporating Non-local Information into Information Extraction Systems by Gibbs Sampling , 2005, ACL.

[33]  David A. Wagner,et al.  Android Permissions Remystified: A Field Study on Contextual Integrity , 2015, USENIX Security Symposium.

[34]  H. Nissenbaum.  Privacy as contextual integrity , 2004 .