Research and Analysis of Android Ad-blockers

• 1、School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876

Abstract：In recent years, with the continuous development of advertising tracking technology, user privacy and security issues have followed.And the application of ad-blockers have also emerged.In this paper, we studied the working principle and mode of Ad-blockers and gave a classification of the mobile Ad-blockers. Through experimental analysis of filtering list, blocking efficiency, malicious code, requesting permission, third-party library and similarity, this paper finds that the main working principle of Ad-blockers is to intercept the ads request by matching the filter list. And this paper finds that it has the problems of incomplete interception and false interception.Some Ad-blockers contain the security problems of including malicious code and requesting non-essential sensitive permissions. And some Ad-blockers have built-in ads themselves.Besides, this paper also finds that some problematic applications simply change package names and application names and then re-upload to the application market.To address these issues, this paper designs and implements a mobile Ad-blockers detection system. The system detects Ad-blockers from the perspective offunctionality, safety and homology.The analysis result enables users to have a more comprehensive understanding of the detected applications and provides users with effective reference when choosing an Ad-blocker.

Keywords： information security advertisement blocking mobile privacy