Today in Online social network (OSN) it is fairly easy to create identities which encourages millions of people to join and use these crowdsourcing systems. However this exactly same property is leveraged by spammers and malicious users to abuse the system. They impersonate legitimate users, spam the network and distribute malicious content; they even try to leverage the identities under their control to manipulate crowdsourced computations like popularity assessment of users or their content. We have done a series of work which has two fold goal: (i) Developing and deploying technologies to asses trust for online identities and (ii) Limiting abuse of crowdsourced systems by developing systems that can detect and control fraudulent activities in these systems.

 

Strengthening Weak Identities Through Inter-Domain Trust Transfer,
Giridhari Venkatadri, Oana Goga, Changtao Zhong, Bimal Viswanath, Krishna P. Gummadi and Nishanth Sastry. World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Montreal, Canada, April 2016.

Strength in Numbers: Robust Tamper Detection in Crowd Computations (Best paper award),
Bimal Viswanath, Muhammad Ahmad Bashir, Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Saikat Guha, Krishna P. Gummadi, Aniket Kate and Alan Mislove. Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN), Palo Alto, CA, November 2015.

The Doppelgänger Bot Attack: Exploring Identity Impersonation in Online Social Networks,
Oana Goga, Giridhari Venkatadri, and Krishna P. Gummadi. Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Tokyo, Japan, October 2015.

Towards Detecting Anomalous User Behavior in Online Social Networks,
Bimal Viswanath, Muhammad Ahmad Bashir, Mark Crovella, Saikat Guha, Krishna P. Gummadi, Balachander Krishnamurthy, and Alan Mislove. Usenix Security Symposium (USENIX Security), San Diego, CA, August 2014.

 

TrulyTweeting -- detecting manipulation (tampering) of popularity of Twitter content

 

TrulyFollowing -- detecting manipulation (tampering) of popularity of Twitter users

 

Oana Goga
Giridhari Venkadri
Bimal Viswanath
Krishna Gummadi