Who on Earth is "Mr. Cypher": Automated friend injection attacks on social networking sites

Abstract

Within this paper we present our novel friend injection attack which exploits the fact that the great majority of social networking sites fail to protect the communication between its users and their services. In a practical evaluation, on the basis of public wireless access points, we furthermore demonstrate the feasibility of our attack. The friend injection attack enables a stealth infiltration of social networks and thus outlines the devastating consequences of active eavesdropping attacks against social networking sites. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2010.