Title
GeoPal: Friend Spam Detection in Social Networks Using Private Location Proofs
Abstract
Friend spam, adversarial invitations sent to social network users, exposes victims to a suite of privacy, spear phishing and malware vulnerabilities. In this paper, we use the location history of users to detect friend spam. We posit that the user trust in friends is associated with their co-location frequency. We exploit this hypothesis to introduce GeoPal, a framework that carefully accesses the potentially sensitive location history of users to privately prove their past location claims, and to privately compute and update fuzzy co-location affinities with other users. We build GeoPal on PLP, a protocol we develop to privately collect proofs of user past locations. We confirm our hypothesis through a user study with 68 participants: 57% and 70% of the friends never met in person are not remembered and are not talked to, respectively, by the participants. In contrast, 86% of the friends met daily or weekly are either family, close or regular friends. We highlight the relevance of friend spam: 75% of the participants have at least one friend whom they do not recall. We show that GeoPal is practical: a Nexus 5 can process more thank 20K location proofs per second.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/SAHCN.2016.7732995
2016 13th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON)
Keywords
Field
DocType
GeoPal framework,friend spam detection,social networks,private location proofs,adversarial invitations,privacy suite,spear phishing,malware vulnerabilities,location history,co-location frequency,fuzzy co-location affinities,PLP protocol,user past locations,Nexus 5
Internet privacy,Social network,Suite,Phishing,Computer security,Computer science,Computer network,Exploit,Mathematical proof,Malware,Adversarial system,Spamming
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5090-1733-1
0
0.34
References 
Authors
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bogdan Carbunar169953.79
Mizanur Rahman212920.97
Mozhgan Azimpour-Kivi382.46
Debra Davis451.43