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, 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 article, 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.