Digital advertising is one of the fastest-growing businesses of contemporary economy: a worldwide market which is already worth more than 200 billion dollars per year, and expected to almost double by 2020. In addition, the global spread of mobile devices, widespread adoption of pervasive IoT technologies, as well as broad diffusion of social media applications have been changing the original target of digital advertising, therefore reaching out to an unprecedented number of users almost anytime and anywhere. Given the multi-billion dollars nature of the advertising market and the lack of legislation against ad fraud in many countries, fraudsters have a strong economic incentive to perpetrate fraudulent activities and exploit vulnerabilities of online advertising systems.

 

Many attacks on such systems have the goal of exhausting advertisers budget. This could be either done by a fraudulent publisher who is attempting to make more money than it deserves, or by a fraudulent advertiser who is targeting other (antagonistic) advertisers to reduce ad competition. Other threats may concern user privacy; indeed, ad networks deploy user profiling mechanisms to better target advertising campaigns. This mostly translates into tracking user’s activities (e.g., for web browsing, exploiting client-side browser state via cookies). Unfortunately, these techniques collect a huge amount of information to identify, profile, and trace the user. Users are thus in need of a way to control the sharing of their information with advertisers in order to protect their privacy.

 

Given this challenging scenario, SPA seeks novel contributions describing theoretical and practical solutions to the aforementioned problems, namely how to make future digital advertising more secure and privacy-aware. Submissions may represent any application area of digital advertising: from traditional display advertising and sponsored search results to in-stream native advertising and mobile app-install ads. In addition, visionary work on new application areas of digital advertising, such as advertising on the Internet of Things, are also highly encouraged.   

 

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) Security and Privacy Issues in: