Adlib: Analyzer for Mobile Ad Platform Libraries
Mobile advertising has become a popular advertising approach by taking advantage of various information from mobile devices and rich interaction with users. Mobile advertising platforms show advertisements of nearby restaurants to users using the geographic locations of their mobile devices, and also allow users to make reservations easily using their phone numbers. However, at the same time, they may open the doors for advertisements to steal device information or to perform malicious behaviors. When application developers integrate mobile advertising platform SDKs (AdSDKs) to their applications, they are informed of only the permissions required by the AdSDKs, and they may not be aware of the rich functionalities of the SDKs that are available to advertisements. In this paper, we first report that various AdSDKs provide powerful functionalities to advertisements, which are seriously vulnerable to security threats. We present representative malicious behaviors by advertisements using APIs provided by AdSDKs. To mitigate the security vulnerability, we develop a static analyzer, Adlib, which analyzes Android Java libraries that use hybrid features to enable communication with JavaScript code and detects possible flows from the APIs that are accessible from third-party advertisements to device-specific features like geographic locations. Our evaluation shows that Adlib found genuine security vulnerabilities from real-world AdSDKs.
Fri 19 JulDisplayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change
11:00 - 12:30 | Static Analysis and DebuggingTechnical Papers at Grand Ballroom Chair(s): Arie van Deursen Delft University of Technology | ||
11:00 22mTalk | Differentially Testing Soundness and Precision of Program Analyzers Technical Papers Christian Klinger University of Texas, Austin, Maria Christakis MPI-SWS, Valentin Wüstholz ConsenSys Diligence Pre-print | ||
11:22 22mTalk | Judge: Identifying, Understanding, and Evaluating Sources of Unsoundness in Call Graphs Technical Papers Michael Reif TU Darmstadt, Germany, Florian Kübler TU Darmstadt, Germany, Michael Eichberg TU Darmstadt, Germany, Dominik Helm TU Darmstadt, Germany, Mira Mezini TU Darmstadt, Germany Pre-print File Attached | ||
11:45 22mTalk | Adlib: Analyzer for Mobile Ad Platform Libraries Technical Papers DOI Pre-print | ||
12:07 22mTalk | Interactive Metamorphic Testing of Debuggers Technical Papers Sandro Tolksdorf TU Darmstadt, Daniel Lehmann TU Darmstadt, Michael Pradel TU Darmstadt and Facebook Link to publication DOI Pre-print |