SybilBlind: Detecting fake users in online social networks without manual labels

Abstract

Detecting fake users (also called Sybils) in online social networks is a basic security research problem. State-of-the-art approaches rely on a large amount of manually labeled users as a training set. These approaches suffer from three key limitations: (1) it is time-consuming and costly to manually label a large training set, (2) they cannot detect new Sybils in a timely fashion, and (3) they are vulnerable to Sybil attacks that leverage information of the training set. In this work, we propose SybilBlind, a structure-based Sybil detection framework that does not rely on a manually labeled training set. SybilBlind works under the same threat model as state-of-the-art structure-based methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SybilBlind using (1) a social network with synthetic Sybils and (2) two Twitter datasets with real Sybils. For instance, SybilBlind achieves an AUC of 0.98 on a Twitter dataset.