Autonomous Permission Recommendation

Modern smartphone operating systems (e.g., Android 6.0 and later versions) employ an ask-on-first-use policy to regulate app permissions. To assist users in policy decisions, relevant efforts have been focusing on leveraging contexts to capture users' privacy preferences. However, these techniques have various limitations, such as heavily relying on users' historical decisions on granting permissions, ignoring the fact that users are not experts on privacy protection, and hard to determine whether a permission shall be granted. To address this problem, we propose an autonomous permission recommendation system, AutoPer+, to automatically recommend users the permission decisions at runtime. The main insight of our proposed system is that the natural language description of an app reflects its functionality and its similarity to other apps, and thus can be used to analyze whether a permission is needed indeed by it, and the apps similar to it. First, we introduce a multi-topic model into app functionality mining, and design a topic-permission mapper for the proposed recommendation system. Then we propose a deep semi-supervised machine using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks to identify similar apps, by which we can explore privacy permission usage in a cluster of apps. Finally, we capture a trade-off between privacy and utility to present a systematic recommendation. In addition to the permission decision (“Allow” or “Deny”), the permission explanations are also provided for users to make decisions (called “Ask”). We evaluate the proposed system via extensive comparison experiments on 31,023 Android apps. The results show that our approach achieves an accuracy of 84.1%. Moreover, we conduct user studies via installing AutoPer+ in the participants' own Android devices. We receive positive responses from the participants, which implies AutoPer+ is potentially for real-world deployment for enhancing current permission recommendation.