Preliminary Exam Talks
On the Internet, "Am I Really not a Dog?'' Assessing the Credibility of Online Personas via Social Networks
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Abstract
Anonymity is one of the main virtues of the Internet. It protects privacy and freedom of speech, but makes it hard to assess the credibility of online users and the content they post. This paper presents FaceTrust, a system that uses online social networks to provide lightweight and attribute-based credentials while preserving a user's anonymity. FaceTrust employs a ``game with a purpose'' design to elicit a user's friends' opinions about his self-claimed attributes such as profession or approximate age, and uses attack-resistant trust inference algorithms to estimate the likelihood that an attribute is true. It then provides a credential, which a user can use to corroborate his online assertions. We evaluate FaceTrust using a crawled social network graph as well as a real-world deployment. The results show that our credibility estimations correlate well with the ground truth, even when a large fraction of the social network users are dishonest.
Biography
Michael Sirivianos is a Ph.D. student at Duke University, working with Prof. Xiaowei Yang. His research interests include network security and peer-to-peer systems. He received a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 2002, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2004. More information is available at http://www.cs.duke.edu/~msirivia