Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that mobile applications that integrate advertisements pose privacy and a security risks. The team conducted a study that examined 100,000 apps from the Google Play market and noticed that more than half contained “ad libraries,” while 297 of the apps included “aggressive ad libraries” that could download and run code from remote servers. Researchers also found that more than 48,000 of the apps that were examined could track location via GPS, while others could access call logs, phone numbers and a list of all the apps a user has stored on his or her phone. Read on for more.

“Running code downloaded from the Internet is problematic because the code could be anything,” said Dr. Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. “For example, it could potentially launch a ‘root exploit’ attack to take control of your phone – as demonstrated in a recently discovered piece of Android malware called RootSmart.”

In-app ad libraries, which retrieve advertisements from remote servers and display ads on a user’s smartphone, are provided to developers by Google or other third-parties. The ad libraries receive the same permissions, however, that the user granted to the app itself when it was first installed – regardless of whether the user is aware he or she was granting these same permissions to the ad library.

“To limit exposure to these risks, we need to isolate ad libraries from apps and make sure they don’t have the same permissions,” Jiang said. “The current model of directly embedding ad libraries in mobile apps does make it convenient for app developers, but also fundamentally introduces privacy and security risks. The best solution would be for Google, Apple and other mobile platform providers to take the lead in providing effective ad-isolation mechanisms.”