Identity Related Threats, Vulnerabilities and Risk Mitigation in Online Social Networks: A Tutorial

This tutorial provides a thorough review of the main research directions in the field of identity management and identity related security threats in Online Social Networks (OSNs). The continuous increase in the numbers and sophistication levels of fake accounts constitutes a big threat to the privacy and to the security of honest OSN users. Uninformed OSN users could be easily fooled into accepting friendship links with fake accounts, giving them by that access to personal information they intend to exclusively share with their real friends. Moreover, these fake accounts subvert the security of the system by spreading malware, connecting with honest users for nefarious goals such as sexual harassment or child abuse, and make the social computing environment mostly untrustworthy. The tutorial introduces the main available research results available in this area, and presents our work on collaborative identity validation techniques to estimate OSN profiles trustworthiness.