Sybil Defense Techniques in Online Social Networks: A Survey

The problem of malicious activities in online social networks, such as Sybil attacks and malevolent use of fake identities, can severely affect the social activities in which users engage while online. For example, this problem can affect content publishing, creation of friendships, messaging, profi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2017, Vol.5, p.1200-1219
Main Authors: Al-Qurishi, Muhammad, Al-Rakhami, Mabrook, Alamri, Atif, Alrubaian, Majed, Rahman, Sk Md Mizanur, Hossain, M. Shamim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Browsing
Context modeling
Cybersecurity
Deactivation
Facebook
Fraud
Google
Online services
Online social networks
Recommender systems
Security systems
Social network services
Social networks
Sybil attack and defense
Sybil impact
Taxonomy
Trustworthiness
Twitter
YouTube
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Summary:The problem of malicious activities in online social networks, such as Sybil attacks and malevolent use of fake identities, can severely affect the social activities in which users engage while online. For example, this problem can affect content publishing, creation of friendships, messaging, profile browsing, and commenting. Moreover, fake identities are often created to disseminate spam, use the private information of other users, commit fraud, and so on. A malicious person can generate numerous fake accounts for these purposes to reach a large number of trustworthy users. Thus, these types of malicious accounts must be detected and deactivated as quickly as possible. However, this objective is challenging, because a fake account can exhibit trustworthy behaviors and have a type of name that will prevent it from being detected by the security system. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of literature from 2006 to 2016 on Sybil attacks in online social networks and use of social networks as a tool to analyze and prevent these attack types. We first review existing Sybil attack definitions, including those in the context of online social networks. We then discuss a new taxonomy of Sybil attack defense schemes and methodologies. Finally, we compare the literature and identify areas for further research in Sybil attacks in online social networks.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2656635