MAdFraud: Investigating Ad Fraud in Android Applications

Many Android applications are distributed for free but are supported by advertisements. Ad libraries embedded in the app fetch content from the ad provider and display it on the app's user interface. The ad provider pays the developer for the ads displayed to the user and ads clicked by the user. A major threat to this ecosystem is ad fraud, where a miscreant's code fetches ads without displaying them to the user or \clicks " on ads automatically. Ad fraud has been extensively studied in the context of web advertising but has gone largely unstudied in the context of mobile advertising. We take the rst step to study mobile ad fraud perpe-trated by Android apps. We identify two fraudulent ad behaviors in apps: 1) requesting ads while the app is in the background, and 2) clicking on ads without user in