Bram Bonné
Bram Bonné is a Software Engineer in the Infrastructure Security and Privacy group at Google. After completing a masters degree in Civil Engineering from KU Leuven, he received his PhD in Computer Science from UHasselt in 2017. His research focused on assessing and improving security and privacy for mobile users.
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The Android Platform Security Model (2023)
Jeff Vander Stoep
Chad Brubaker
Dianne Hackborn
Michael Specter
Arxiv, Cornell University (2023)
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Android is the most widely deployed end-user focused operating system. With its growing set of use cases
encompassing communication, navigation, media consumption, entertainment, finance, health, and access to
sensors, actuators, cameras, or microphones, its underlying security model needs to address a host of practical
threats in a wide variety of scenarios while being useful to non-security experts. To support this flexibility,
Android’s security model must strike a difficult balance between security, privacy, and usability for end users;
provide assurances for app developers; and maintain system performance under tight hardware constraints.
This paper aims to both document the assumed threat model and discuss its implications, with a focus on
the ecosystem context in which Android exists. We analyze how different security measures in past and
current Android implementations work together to mitigate these threats, and, where there are special cases
in applying the security model in practice; we discuss these deliberate deviations and examine their impact.
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Exploring decision making with Android's runtime permission dialogs using in-context surveys
Thirteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), Usenix (2017)
Preview abstract
A great deal of research on the management of user data on smartphones via permission systems has revealed significant levels of user discomfort, lack of understanding, and lack of attention. The majority of these studies were conducted on Android devices before runtime permission dialogs were widely deployed. In this paper we explore how users make decisions with runtime dialogs on smartphones with Android 6.0 or higher. We employ an experience sampling methodology in order to ask users the reasons influencing their decisions immediately after they decide. We conducted a longitudinal survey with 157 participants over a 6 week period.
We explore the grant and denial rates of permissions, overall and on a per permission type basis. Overall, our participants accepted 84% of the permission requests. We observe differences in the denial rates across permissions types; these vary from 23% (for microphone) to 10% (calendar). We find that one of the main reasons for granting or denying a permission request depends on users’ expectation on whether or not an app should need a permission. A common reason for denying permissions is because users know they can change them later. Among the permissions granted, our participants said they were comfortable with 90% of those decisions - indicating that for 10% of grant decisions users may be consenting reluctantly. Interestingly, we found that women deny permissions twice as often as men.
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