AWare helps people protect their privacy by requiring users to give permission a second time if an app tries to access unneeded sensors. This approach ensures that users are more aware of what permissions they are granting and helps prevent deceitful apps from accessing sensors they shouldn't be using.
Giuseppe Petracca is a computer scientist and engineer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He and his colleagues took a different approach. They are trying to protect users from accidentally allowing sensor access to deceitful apps. Their security system is called AWare.
When they are first installed, apps have to get a user permission to access certain sensors. This might include the mic and camera. But people can be careless about granting those permissions, Uluagac says. All too often, “people blindly give permission,” he says, to use the phone’s camera or microphone. They may give no thought to why the apps might — or might not — need them.
AWare would instead request permission from a user before an app can access a certain sensor the first time a user provided a certain input. For instance, this might happen when you press a camera’s button the first time after downloading an app. On top of that, the AWare system memorizes the state of the phone when the user grants that first permission. It remembers the exact appearance of the screen, the sensors that were requested and other information. That way, AWare can tell users if and when the app later attempts to trick them into granting unintended permissions.
The Penn State researchers imagined a crafty data-stealing app. It would ask for camera access when the user first pushes a camera button. But it would then also try to access the mic when the user later pushes that same button. The AWare system would realize the mic access wasn’t part of the initial deal. It would then ask the user again if he or she would like to grant this additional permission.
Petracca and his colleagues tested AWare with people using Nexus smartphones. Those using phone equipped with AWare avoided unwanted authorizations about 93 percent of the time. That’s compared with just 9 percent among people using smartphones with typical first-use or install-time permission policies.How does AWare help people protect their privacy?
by making a user give permission every time an app accesses their phone's sensors
by limiting which types of sensors an app can access
by requiring users to give permission a second time if an app tries to access unneeded sensors
by stipulating that users have a password that allows apps to access their phone's sensors
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