Risk Assessment in Social Networks Based on User Anomalous Behaviors

Although the dramatic increase in Online Social Network (OSN) usage, there are still a lot of security and privacy concerns. In such a scenario, it would be very beneficial to have a mechanism able to assign a risk score to each OSN user. For this reason, in this paper, we propose a risk assessment based on the idea that the more a user behavior diverges from what it can be considered as a ‘normal behavior’, the more it should be considered risky. In doing this, we have taken into account that OSN population is really heterogeneous in observed behaviors. As such, it is not possible to define a unique standard behavioral model that fits all OSN users’ behaviors. However, we expect that similar people tend to follow similar rules with the results of similar behavioral models. For this reason, we propose a risk assessment approach organized into two phases: similar users are first grouped together, then, for each identified group, we build one or more models for normal behavior. The carried out experiments on a real Facebook dataset show that the proposed model outperforms a simplified behavioral-based risk assessment where behavioral models are built over the whole OSN population, without a group identification phase.