Free Apps Drains Battery & Security Threat

[csmart 472]

I just come across an article which states that free apps drains battery as well as they are security threat. These free apps are generally make money through ads. So while showing ads, they download from net and hence consume lot of power. they are security threat as they allow remote code to run on devices. A study was done in US university and they are going present the paper sometime next month.

the paper is available to download, chekc the link in the article..

Source

Free apps drain batteries, risk security, studies say

We all know that free smartphone apps make their money by showing you ads. But they're also draining your phone's battery and risking your privacy and security, according to two new studies.

"Free apps like Free Chess and Angry Birds spend under 25-35 percent of their energy on gameplay, but over 65-75 percent on user tracking, uploading user information and downloading ads," Abhinav Pathak and Y. Charlie Hu, of Purdue University, and Ming Zhang, of Microsoft Research, wrote in their paper "

Where is the energy spent inside my app? Fine grained energy accounting on smartphones with Eprof." They're scheduled to present their findings next month, at EuroSys2012.

The researchers also found energy bugs that use up power, and said a new "bundling" system of energy accounting could cut use by 20 percent to 65 percent.

"(T)he quarter-million apps developed so far were largely developed in an energy oblivious manner," they wrote.

Meanwhile, researchers at North Carolina State University reported Monday that free apps pose privacy and security risks, because many allow ad providers to download and run code from remote servers.

"Running code downloaded from the Internet is problematic because the code could be anything," Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of "

Unsafe Exposure Analysis of Mobile In-App Advertisements," said in a university news release. "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."

NC State doctoral students Michael Grace and Wu Zhou, and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi of the Technical University Darmstadt, co-wrote the paper, which the researchers are scheduled to present next month at the

5th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks

in Tucson.

Third-party ad libraries retrieve and run ads in apps, and have the same permissions users grant to the app itself. The researchers looked at 100,000 apps in the Google Play market, finding that:

• More than half used ad libraries;
  
• 297 of the apps had ad libraries that used an unsafe mechanism to fetch and run code from the Internet;
  
• 48,139 had ad libraries that track a user's location via GPS (presumably for ad targetting);
  
• 4,190 used ad libraries that allowed advertisers themselves to access a user's location via GPS;
  
• Some apps used ad libraries that accessed call logs, user phone numbers and lists of all apps stored on a phone.
  

What should be done about this?

"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 in the news release. "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."

[gpkumaran 21]

You can use adblock to counter that right?

[csmart 472]

I think adlock owrks only on browsers and not other apps.

[ami1 237]

You can install custom 'hosts' file which blocks 90% of ads by redirecting the known adserver domains to 127.0.0.1

So browsers as well as any apps trying to make a tcp/ip connection to their adservers to download images/etc just silently fail in the background.

Most custom ROMs have this - for android at least. You can see it in the features.

Edited March 20, 2012 by ami1

[KumaarShah 143]

How about switching off the 3G or wifi while using such apps? Will the app/game not work properly if the data is off? I switch off data when playing Angry Birds. It works much the same as when the data is on, and only problem is that the ads are shown when the data is on.

[Karthik R 246]

Has anyone else noticed that the study was conducted by Microsoft!! See the irony!

MS, who is losing sleep over Android / Apple domination of smartphone market, would have an evident reason to be slanted and biased, with a possible touch of over exaggeration.

[KumaarShah 143]

^^^

Ha ha ha