Towards Comprehensible and Effective Permission Systems

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 de...

Free choice permission is a long-standing puzzle in deontic logic and natural language semantics involving a so-called conjunctive use of or: from You may eat an apple or a pear, we can infer that You may eat an apple and that You may eat a pear—but not that You may eat an apple and a pear. Following Lokhorst 1997, I argue that because permission is a limited resource, a resource-sensitive logi...

Android security has been a hot spot recently in both academic research and public concerns due to numerous instances of security attacks and privacy leakage on Android platform. Android security has been built upon a permission based mechanism which restricts accesses of third-party Android applications to critical resources on an Android device. Such permission based mechanism is widely criti...

Separation logic began by describing total separation between the heap space used by separate parts of a program. It has moved on to consider how total and partial permissions to access heap elements can be transferred between concurrent threads. The roots of the new approach are in Boyland’s [3] demonstration of the utility of fractional permissions in reasoning about programs. We add the noti...

This thesis investigates how museum companions organise their conduct regarding their engagement with the exhibition and their social interaction with each other in the course of a visit. The main objectives of the thesis are the empirical investigation of social conduct in casual group museum visits and the exploration and understanding of social conduct in real-time distributed museum visits ...

It is well known that buckling instabilities occur when elastic solids are subject to compressive stresses. However, this does not preclude the occurrence of instabilities in systems subject to global tensile loads. Such tensile instabilities may be caused by certain discontinuities (geometrical or material) which re-distribute the stresses applied on its boundary, generating local compressive ...

It is difficult to write parallel programs that are correct. This is because of the potential for data races, when parallel tasks access shared data in complex and unexpected ways. A classic approach to addressing this problem is dynamic race detection, which has the benefits of working transparently to the programmer and not raising any false alarms. Unfortunately, dynamic race detection is ve...

Considerable research shows that personal information privacy has eroded over the last 30 years. Prior research, however, takes a consumer-centric view of personal information privacy, a view that leads to the conclusion that the individual is responsible for his/her own information. This research presents and defends a comprehensive personal information privacy model of extra-organizational da...

Mobile operating systems adopt permission systems to protect system integrity and user privacy. In this work, we propose INSPIRED, an intention-aware dynamic mediation system for mobile operating systems with privacy preserving capability. When a security or privacy sensitive behavior is triggered, INSPIRED automatically infers the underlying program intention by examining its runtime environme...