Abstract

Recently, there has been significant research interest in leveraging social networks to defend against Sybil attacks. While much of this work may appear similar at first glance, existing social network-based Sybil defense schemes can be divided into two categories: Sybil detection and Sybil tolerance. These two categories of systems both leverage global properties of the underlying social graph, but they rely on different assumptions and provide different guarantees: Sybil detection schemes are application-independent and rely only on the graph structure to identify Sybil identities, while Sybil tolerance schemes rely on application-specific information and leverage the graph structure and transaction history to bound the leverage an attacker can gain from using multiple identities. In this paper, we take a closer look at the design goals, models, assumptions, guarantees, and limitations of both categories of social network-based Sybil defense systems.

Recently, there has been a significant interest in research to leverage social networks to defend against Sybil attacks. While much of this work may seem similar at first glance, Sybil's existing social defence schemes can be divided into two categories: Sybil's detection and Sybil's tolerance. These two categories of systems take advantage of the overall properties of the underlying social graph, but are based on different assumptions and offer different assurances: Sybil's detection schemes are independent of the application and are based only on the structure of the graphs to identify the identities Of Sybil. In application-specific information and take advantage of the graph structure and transaction history to limit the influence an attacker can get when using multiple identities. In this article, we look more closely at the design objectives, models, assumptions, assurances, and limitations of both Sybil's social network-based defence systems categories.


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