Minimizing trust leaks for robust Sybil detection

Sybil detection is a crucial task to protect online social networks (OSNs) against intruders who try to manipulate automatic services provided by OSNs to their customers. In this paper, we first discuss the robustness of graph-based Sybil detectors SybilRank and Integro and refine theoretically their security guarantees towards more realistic assumptions. After that, we formally introduce adversarial settings for the graph-based Sybil detection problem and derive a corresponding optimal attacking strategy by exploitation of trust leaks. Based on our analysis, we propose transductive Sybil ranking (TSR), a robust extension to SybilRank and Integro that directly minimizes trust leaks. Our empirical evaluation shows significant advantages of TSR over state-of-the-art competitors on a variety of attacking scenarios on artificially generated data and real-world datasets.