Beat the DIVa - decentralized identity validation for online social networks

Abstract

Fake accounts in online social networks (OSNs) have known considerable sophistication and are now attempting to gain network trust by infiltrating within honest communities. Honest users have limited perspective on the truthfulness of new online identities requesting their friendship. This facilitates the task of fake accounts in deceiving honest users to befriend them. To address this, we have proposed a model that learns hidden correlations between profile attributes within OSN communities, and exploits them to assist users in estimating the trustworthiness of new profiles. To demonstrate our method, we suggest, in this demo, a game application through which players try to cheat the system and convince nodes in a simulated OSN to befriend them. The game deploys different strategies to challenge the players and to reach the objectives of the demo. These objectives are to make participants aware of how fake accounts can infiltrate within their OSN communities, to demonstrate how our suggested method could aid in mitigating this threat, and to eventually strengthen our model based on the data collected from the moves of the players.