D. Ad Library Identification
Applications that monetize with advertisements typically
partner with ad networks and embed code called ad libraries
from them in order to display and manage advertisements. Our
goal is to comprehensively identify ad networks that participate
in the Android ecosystem and their associated ad libraries.
Such an identification is important for automatically classifying
if a malicious activity is a result of an advertisement or is
the responsibility of the application developer. Some simple
domain knowledge, such as which ad networks are there in the
market, may not provide a comprehensive list we are looking
for. We instead resorted to two systematic approaches to do
this identification based on the ad libraries embedded in the
code.