FraudDroid: Automated Ad Fraud Detection for Android Apps

TL;DR

FraudDroid is a hybrid dynamic analysis tool that detects various types of ad frauds in Android apps by analyzing UI transitions and network traffic, achieving high precision and recall.

Contribution

The paper introduces FraudDroid, a novel approach that detects both static and dynamic ad frauds in Android apps through dynamic UI analysis and heuristic rules, addressing gaps in existing methods.

Findings

Detects ad frauds with 93% precision and 92% recall.

Successfully identified 335 ad fraud cases in 12,000 apps.

Capable of detecting a wide spectrum of ad fraud types.

Abstract

Although mobile ad frauds have been widespread, state-of-the-art approaches in the literature have mainly focused on detecting the so-called static placement frauds, where only a single UI state is involved and can be identified based on static information such as the size or location of ad views. Other types of fraud exist that involve multiple UI states and are performed dynamically while users interact with the app. Such dynamic interaction frauds, although now widely spread in apps, have not yet been explored nor addressed in the literature. In this work, we investigate a wide range of mobile ad frauds to provide a comprehensive taxonomy to the research community. We then propose, FraudDroid, a novel hybrid approach to detect ad frauds in mobile Android apps. FraudDroid analyses apps dynamically to build UI state transition graphs and collects their associated runtime network traffics, which are then leveraged to check against a set of heuristic-based rules for identifying ad fraudulent behaviours. We show empirically that FraudDroid detects ad frauds with a high precision (93%) and recall (92%). Experimental results further show that FraudDroid is capable of detecting ad frauds across the spectrum of fraud types. By analysing 12,000 ad-supported Android apps, FraudDroid identified 335 cases of fraud associated with 20 ad networks that are further confirmed to be true positive results and are shared with our fellow researchers to promote advanced ad fraud detection