A defence scheme against Identity Theft Attack based on multiple social networks

•We define the Identity Theft Attacks on multi-dimensional social networks.•We propose a scheme to protect users from Identity Theft Attacks.•Our scheme does not violate the nature of social networks.•We validate the availability of our scheme through experimental results.

Recently, on-line social networking sites become more and more popular. People like to share their personal information such as their name, birthday and photos on these public sites. However, personal information could be misused by attackers. One kind of attacks called Identity Theft Attack is addressed in on-line social networking sites. After collecting the personal information of a victim, the attacker can create a fake identity to impersonate this victim and cheat the victim’s friends in order to destroy the trust relationships on the on-line social networking sites. In this paper, we propose a scheme to protect users from Identity Theft Attacks. In our work, users’ personal information can be still kept public. It means that this scheme does not violate the nature of the social networks. Compared with previous works, the proposed scheme incurs less overhead for users. Experimental results also demonstrate the practicality of the proposed scheme.