Ease or Privacy? A Comprehensive Analysis of Android Embedded Adware

With hundreds of millions of Android phone users in around 190 countries, the global smartphone market has witnessed extraordinary and explosive growth, which is escorted with the vast number of its applications. It has an open source code platform that encourages app developers to develop Android applications and introduce them free-of-cost in the market. Applications are considered as the heart of Android phone that drive innovation, leisure, ease of availability and compatibility with the mobile devices. Embedded adware or mobile advertising is rapidly finding its ways into android applications in the form of banner ads, rich media or interstitial ads.. This paper aims to highlight risk of privacy leakage of end users by introducing an attack model and exploring attacks caused by in-application advertisements. It also presents theoretical framework by quantitative analytic approach to figure out the impact of embedded adware on Android user's privacy.