Slimming Applications on Android OS

摘要

Google Android allows developers to easily distribute their applications by the various software marketplaces and end users to readily install them. However, without strict inspection and audit, some serious security concerns are inevitable such as the abuse of permissions. The existing security mechanism in Android cannot differentiate between the actually useful permissions and the unused permissions. In this paper, we present a reinforced Android framework model which is capable of purifying permissions automatically according to actual operations at runtime and supporting users to selectively customize the actual useful permissions of applications by imposing fine-grained constraints on the usage of resources. Experimental results show the automatic process can slim third-party applications efficiently.