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Improving Social Network-Based Sybil Defenses by Rewiring and Augmenting Social Graphs

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Information Security Applications (WISA 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8267))

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Abstract

Recent solutions to defend against the Sybil attack, in which a node generates multiple identities, using social networks. In these solutions, social networks are assumed to be fast mixing, and Sybil nodes—which disrupt the fast mixing property of social networks—are detected. Little is known about the cause of the mixing quality in social graphs, and how to improve it in slow mixing ones. In this work we relate the mixing time of social graphs to graph degeneracy, which captures cohesiveness of the graph. We experimentally show that fast-mixing graphs tend to have a larger single core whereas slow-mixing graphs tend to have smaller multiple cores. We then propose several heuristics to improve the mixing of slow-mixing graphs using their topological structures by augmenting them. We show that our heuristics greatly improve Sybil defenses.

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Acknowledgement

Part of this work appears in our unpublished prior study in [20]. The first author would like to thank Y. Kim, N. Hopper, and H. Tran for their help with the prior work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Verisign Labs, Reston, VA, 20190, USA

    Aziz Mohaisen & Scott Hollenbeck

Authors
  1. Aziz Mohaisen
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  2. Scott Hollenbeck
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Correspondence to Aziz Mohaisen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. KAIST, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Yongdae Kim

  2. Korea University, Seoul, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Heejo Lee

  3. CyLab Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    Adrian Perrig

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Mohaisen, A., Hollenbeck, S. (2014). Improving Social Network-Based Sybil Defenses by Rewiring and Augmenting Social Graphs. In: Kim, Y., Lee, H., Perrig, A. (eds) Information Security Applications. WISA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8267. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05149-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05149-9_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05148-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05149-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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