A novel defense mechanism to protect users from profile cloning attack on Online Social Networks (OSNs)

Nowadays, Online Social Networks (OSNs) are becoming more and more popular means of communication as they are easily accessible and offer advanced features to their users. The quantity of social network users is radically expanding each year. The increase in the number of users has also led to a tremendous increase in security threats such as the profile cloning attack. In profile cloning attacks, attackers create the exact or similar duplicate fake profiles as victims with malicious intention and deceive target individuals on OSNs. Current social networks do not offer any active security services to verify the authenticity of users who send friend requests; hence incautious users can quickly become victims of profile cloning attacks. The literature lacks effective, efficient and accurate protection techniques. This paper proposes a novel defense mechanism to protect users from profile cloning attacks on OSNs. Our scheme is based on attribute similarity, friend list similarity and strength of ties measures. We analyze user profiles, identify the key attributes and friend lists, and measure the attribute similarity and friend list similarity between profiles. Relationship strength among users can help authenticate users on OSNs. We include the relationship strength measure with the attribute and friend list similarity to distinguish between cloned and genuine profiles. The proposed defense scheme is tested with the synthetic and real-world datasets, and the results are compared with the current method. The empirical results validate the scheme’s effectiveness, efficacy, and accuracy. Our scheme outperforms the existing method and has low false rates.