Identifying multi-ID users in open forums

Abstract

We describe a model for real-time communication exchange in public forums, such as newsgroups and chatroorns, and use this model to develop an efficient algorithm which identifies the users that post their messages under different IDs, multi-ID users. Our simulations show that, under the model's assumptions, the identification of multi-ID users is highly effective, with false positive and false negative rates of about 0.1% in the worst case.