AdSplit: Separating Smartphone Advertising from Applications

A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. Advertising libraries often need additional permissions, requiring applications to issue requests for additional permissions to their users at install time. This article describes our AdSplit model, where we extended Android to allow an application and its advertising to run as separate processes, under separate user IDs, eliminating the need for applications to request permissions on behalf of their advertising libraries.