SybilDefender: Defend against sybil attacks in large social networks

—Distributed systems without trusted identities are particularly vulnerable to sybil attacks, where an adversary creates multiple bogus identities to compromise the running of the system. This paper presents SybilDefender, a sybil defense mechanism that leverages the network topologies to defend against sybil attacks in social networks. Based on performing a limited number of random walks within the social graphs, SybilDefender is efficient and scalable to large social networks. Our experiments on two 3,000,000 node real-world social topologies show that SybilDefender outperforms the state of the art by one to two orders of magnitude in both accuracy and running time. SybilDefender can effectively identify the sybil nodes and detect the sybil community around a sybil node, even when the number of sybil nodes introduced by each attack edge is close to the theoretically detectable lower bound. Besides, we propose two approaches to limiting the number of attack edges in online social n...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Wei Wei, Fengyuan Xu, Chiu Chiang Tan, Qun Li
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2012, Online Social Networks, Orders Of Magnitude, Random Walks