Advertisement removal of Android applications by reverse engineering

Abstract

Millions of apps cover all aspects of our lives and make smartphones success. Advertisers financially support developers but also collect users' privacy. Several ad blocking apps help users to eliminate advertisement by filtering or redirection for certain targets whose list is maintained by a third party, and some of them require root permission. We develop an advertisement removal program with the technique of reverse engineering, which can effectively patch the advertising code, even obfuscated by other tools. The proposed method takes no overhead at runtime, and requires neither root permission nor list updating. This study also gives a different perspective on tailoring behavior of Android applications.