Abstract

Anonymity is one of the main virtues of the Internet. It protects
privacy and freedom of speech, but makes it hard to assess the
credibility of online users and the content they post. This paper
presents FaceTrust, a system that uses online social networks to
provide lightweight and attribute-based credentials while preserving a
user's anonymity. FaceTrust employs a ``game with a purpose'' design
to elicit a user's friends' opinions about his self-claimed attributes
such as profession or approximate age, and uses attack-resistant trust
inference algorithms to estimate the likelihood that an attribute is
true. It then provides a credential, which a user can use to
corroborate his online assertions. We evaluate FaceTrust using a
crawled social network graph as well as a real-world deployment. The
results show that our credibility estimations correlate well with the
ground truth, even when a large fraction of the social network users
are dishonest.

Note:

You can install FaceTrust's Facebook application, called "Am I Really?", at
http://apps.facebook.com/am-i-really 


Speaker Bio

Michael Sirivianos is a Ph.D. student at Duke University. His research
interests include network security and peer-to-peer systems. He
received a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the
National Technical University of Athens in 2002, and an M.S. in
Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego in
2004. More information is available at
http://www.cs.duke.edu/~msirivia.