Identification services for online social networks (OSNs) extended abstract

On-line Social Networks (OSNs) have dramatically changed how users connect, communicate, share content, and exchange goods and services. However, despite all the benefits and the flexibility that OSNs provide, their users become more reliant on online identities with often no means to know who really is behind an online profile. Indeed, to facilitate their adoption and encourage people to join, identities in OSNs are very loose, in that not much more than an email address is required to create an account and related profile. Therefore, the problem of fake accounts and identity related attacks in OSNs has attracted considerable interest from the research community, and resulted in several proposals that mainly aim at detecting malicious nodes that follow identified and formalized attack trends. Without denying the importance of formalizing Sybil attacks and suggesting solutions for their detection, in this extended abstract we also consider the issue of identity validation from a user perspective, by briefly discussing the research proposals aiming at empowering users with tools helping them to identify the validity of the online accounts they interact with.