Paul Pearce and Adrienne Porter Felt and Gabriel Nunez and David Wagner

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2013-59

May 14, 2013

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-59.pdf

Advertising is a critical part of the Android ecosystem— many applications use one or more advertising services as a source of revenue. To use these services, developers must bundle third-party, binary-only libraries into their applications. In this model, applications and their advertising libraries share permissions. Advertising-supported applications must request multiple privacy-sensitive permissions on behalf of their advertising libraries, and advertising libraries receive access to all of their host applications’ other permissions. We conducted a study of the Android Market and found that 49% of Android applications contain at least one advertising library, and these libraries overprivilege 46% of advertising-supported applications. Further, we find that 56% of the applications with advertisements that request location (34% of all applications) do so only because of advertisements. Such pervasive overprivileging is a threat to user privacy. We introduce AdDroid, a privilege separated advertising framework for the Android platform. AdDroid introduces a new advertising API and corresponding advertising permissions for the Android platform. This enables AdDroid to separate privileged advertising functionality from host applications, allowing applications to show advertisements without requesting privacy-sensitive permissions.

Advisors: David Wagner and Vern Paxson

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BibTeX citation:

@mastersthesis{Pearce:EECS-2013-59,
    Author= {Pearce, Paul and Felt, Adrienne Porter and Nunez, Gabriel and Wagner, David},
    Title= {AdDroid: Privilege Separation for Applications and Advertisers in Android},
    School= {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year= {2013},
    Month= {May},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-59.html},
    Number= {UCB/EECS-2013-59},
    Abstract= {Advertising is a critical part of the Android ecosystem— many applications use one or more advertising services as a source of revenue. To use these services, developers must bundle third-party, binary-only libraries into their applications. In this model, applications and their advertising libraries share permissions. Advertising-supported applications must request multiple privacy-sensitive permissions on behalf of their advertising libraries, and advertising libraries receive access to all of their host applications’ other permissions. We conducted a study of the Android Market and found that 49% of Android applications contain at least one advertising library, and these libraries overprivilege 46% of advertising-supported applications. Further, we find that 56% of the applications with advertisements that request location (34% of all applications) do so only because of advertisements. Such pervasive overprivileging is a threat to user privacy. We introduce AdDroid, a privilege separated advertising framework for the Android platform. AdDroid introduces a new advertising API and corresponding advertising permissions for the Android platform. This enables AdDroid to separate privileged advertising functionality from host applications, allowing applications to show advertisements without requesting privacy-sensitive permissions.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Thesis
%A Pearce, Paul 
%A Felt, Adrienne Porter 
%A Nunez, Gabriel 
%A Wagner, David 
%T AdDroid: Privilege Separation for Applications and Advertisers in Android
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2013
%8 May 14
%@ UCB/EECS-2013-59
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-59.html
%F Pearce:EECS-2013-59