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Don't Bite Off More than You Can Chew: Investigating Excessive Permission Requests in Trigger-Action Integrations

Published: 13 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Web-based trigger-action platforms (TAP) allow users to integrate Internet of Things (IoT) systems and online services into trigger-action integrations (TAIs), facilitating rich automation tasks known as applets. Despite their benefits, these integrations~(typically involving the TAP, trigger, and action service providers) pose significant security and privacy challenges, such as mis-triggering and data leakage. This work investigates cross-entity permission management within TAIs to address the underlying causes of these security and privacy issues, emphasizing permission-functionality consistency to ensure fairness in permission requests. We introduce PFCon, a system that leverages GPT-based language models for analyzing required and requested permissions, revealing excessive permission requests in a large-scale study of IFTTT TAP. Our findings highlight the need for service providers to enforce permission-functionality consistency, raising awareness of the importance of security and privacy in TAI.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      WWW '24: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024
      May 2024
      4826 pages
      ISBN:9798400701719
      DOI:10.1145/3589334
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      Published: 13 May 2024

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      Author Tags

      1. excessive permissions
      2. third-party services
      3. trigger-action platforms

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      May 13 - 17, 2024
      Singapore, Singapore

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