Projects per year
Abstract
Advertisement drives the economy of the mobile app ecosystem. As a key component in the mobile ad business model, mobile ad content has been overlooked by the research community, which poses a number of threats, e.g., propagating malware and undesirable contents. To understand the practice of these devious ad behaviors, we perform a large-scale study on the app contents harvested through automated app testing. In this work, we first provide a comprehensive categorization of devious ad contents, including five kinds of behaviors belonging to two categories: ad loading content and ad clicking content. Then, we propose MadDroid, a framework for automated detection of devious ad contents. MadDroid leverages an automated app testing framework with a sophisticated ad view exploration strategy for effectively collecting ad-related network traffic and subsequently extracting ad contents. We then integrate dedicated approaches into the framework to identify devious ad contents. We have applied MadDroid to 40,000 Android apps and found that roughly 6% of apps deliver devious ad contents, e.g., distributing malicious apps that cannot be downloaded via traditional app markets. Experiment results indicate that devious ad contents are prevalent, suggesting that our community should invest more effort into the detection and mitigation of devious ads towards building a trustworthy mobile advertising ecosystem.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference WWW 2020 |
Editors | Tie-Yan Liu, Maarten van Steen |
Place of Publication | New York NY USA |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 1715-1726 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450370233 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Event | International World Wide Web Conference 2020 - Taipei, Taiwan Duration: 20 Apr 2020 → 24 Apr 2020 Conference number: 29th https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3366423 (Proceedings) https://www2020.thewebconf.org (Website) |
Conference
Conference | International World Wide Web Conference 2020 |
---|---|
Abbreviated title | WWW 2020 |
Country/Territory | Taiwan |
City | Taipei |
Period | 20/04/20 → 24/04/20 |
Internet address |
|
Keywords
- ad fraud
- Android app
- malware
- mobile advertising
Projects
- 2 Active
-
ValDefFixApp: Values-oriented Defect Fixing for Mobile Software Applications
Grundy, J., Whittle, J., Turhan, B., Xia, X. & Li, L.
2/05/20 → 1/05/23
Project: Research
-
Enabling Compatible and Secure Mobile Apps via Automated Program Repair
Australian Research Council (ARC)
1/03/20 → 28/02/23
Project: Research