User Interactions and Permission Use on Android

Android and other mobile operating systems ask users for au­ thorization before allowing apps to access sensitive resources such as contacts and location. We hypothesize that such au­ thorization systems could be improved by becoming more integrated with the app’s user interface. In this paper, we conduct two studies to test our hypothesis. First, we use AppTracer, a dynamic analysis tool we developed, to measure to what extent user interactions and sensitive resource use are re­ lated in existing apps. Second, we conduct an online survey to examine how different interactions with the UI affect users’ ex­ pectations about whether an app accesses sensitive resources. The results of our studies suggest that user interactions such as button clicks can be interpreted as authorization, reducing the need for separate requests; but that accesses not directly tied to user interactions should be separately authorized, possibly when apps are first launched. ACM Classification