TY - GEN
T1 - Dissecting Mobile Offerwall Advertisements
T2 - 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security, QRS 2020
AU - Xu, Guosheng
AU - Hu, Yangyu
AU - Guo, Qian
AU - He, Ren
AU - Li, Li
AU - Xu, Guoai
AU - Han, Zhihui
AU - Wang, Haoyu
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 IEEE.
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - Mobile advertising has become the most popular monetizing way in the Android app ecosystem. Offerwall, as a new form of mobile ads, has been widely adopted by apps, and a number of ad networks have provided such services. Although new to the ecosystem, offerwall ads have been criticized for being aggressive, and the contents disseminated are prone to security issues. However, to date, our community has not proposed any studies to dissect such issues related to offerwall ads. To this end, we present the first work to fill this gap. Specifically, we first develop a robust approach to identify apps that have embedded with offerwall ads. Then, we apply the tool to 10K apps and experimentally discover 312 offerwall apps. We go one step further to characterize them from several aspects, including security issues. Our observation reveals that offerwall ads could indeed be manipulated by hackers to fulfill malicious purposes.
AB - Mobile advertising has become the most popular monetizing way in the Android app ecosystem. Offerwall, as a new form of mobile ads, has been widely adopted by apps, and a number of ad networks have provided such services. Although new to the ecosystem, offerwall ads have been criticized for being aggressive, and the contents disseminated are prone to security issues. However, to date, our community has not proposed any studies to dissect such issues related to offerwall ads. To this end, we present the first work to fill this gap. Specifically, we first develop a robust approach to identify apps that have embedded with offerwall ads. Then, we apply the tool to 10K apps and experimentally discover 312 offerwall apps. We go one step further to characterize them from several aspects, including security issues. Our observation reveals that offerwall ads could indeed be manipulated by hackers to fulfill malicious purposes.
KW - Android
KW - Malware
KW - Mobile Advertising
KW - Offerwall
KW - Pay-per Install
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85099307235
U2 - 10.1109/QRS51102.2020.00072
DO - 10.1109/QRS51102.2020.00072
M3 - 会议稿件
AN - SCOPUS:85099307235
T3 - Proceedings - 2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security, QRS 2020
SP - 518
EP - 526
BT - Proceedings - 2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security, QRS 2020
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 11 December 2020 through 14 December 2020
ER -