dc.description.abstract | In this research, we plan to develop a novice click fraud detection solution named Click Fraud Defender (CFD) to solve this notorious security threat to the Internet-based advertising and companies posting ads on Web Pages. Along with the popularity of Internet, Internet has become a major part of many persons’ everyday life. Internet advertising becomes a new form of commercial activities and creates tens of billions-dollar revenue each year. And the trend keeps on increasing and new advertising forms continues emerging. Among them, one of the most famous ones is pay-per-click advertising.
Under pay-per-click advertising, 3 parties are involved, advertisers, advertising agents, and content providers. An advertiser contacts and pays an advertising agent to post her/his advertisements. The advertising agent in turn contacts a content provider (such as a web site owner) to put hyper-links to her/his customer’s (advertiser’s) web sites on the content provider’s web sites and pays the content provider a fixed fee for each visit of the advertiser’s web sites by a user who made the visit through a hyper-link on the content provider’s web sites.
Unlike advertising on traditional mass media which charges advertisers fixed fee, no matter how many persons really read advertisers’ advertisements, pay-per-click advertising charges advertisers according to the number of persons that really read their advertisements. Usually, advertisers have fixed amount of budget for pay-per-click advertising each day; hence, a fixed number of persons could read their advertisements through the hyper-links posted on content providers’ web sites.
Due to the tremendous profit involved, one kind of attacks targeted at pay-per-click advertisements is used. This new kind of attacks is name click fraud and has two different forms. The first one is usually adopted by the commercial competitors of advertisers to consume up their advertising budget; hence, thwart normal users to see the advertisements. The second one is usually exploited by vicious users which forge the clicks to cheat advertising agents out of money. According to statistic, each year 20% of Google’s revenue (about six billion dollars) is stolen by click fraud.
In this research, based on TCP splicing we will develop an accurate and effective solution, Click Fraud Defender, to solve this infamous security problem. Due to the property of TCP splicing, CFD is able to observe all traffic flowing between a web browser and a web server of an advertiser; hence, by comparing the behavior of normal users and click fraud attackers, CFD should be able to detect web traffic made by click fraud attackers. The behavior can be defined by the frequency of clicks, the number of clicks, and the percentage of a web page downloaded by a host. Because in order to make a successful click fraud attack, the above behavior of a click fraud attacker must be different from a normal one; otherwise, it will be very difficult for the attacker to prevent herself/himself from being discovered. CFD will be implemented on a Linux platform. And to improve performance, CFD will be implemented in the Linux kernel. | en_US |