Abstract: The runtime permission model of Android system proposes a new concept of permission groups. As application markets lacking description information of permissions, users are unable to know the importance of permission groups in the application and its setups. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes an importance analysis method for permission groups, which analyzes an application through reverse engineering, ranks permission groups with the help of ranking algorithm, determines the usages and setups of permission groups in the application, and uses machine learning to test and evaluate this analysis method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can analyze importance of permission groups in the application and recommend appropriate setups for permission groups.

Key words:  permission groups, reverse engineering, ranking algorithm, machine learning