Ahmed Alharbi

Ahmed Alharbi, Hai Dong, Xun Yi et al.

We propose a novel approach to effectively detect cloned identities of social-sensor cloud service providers (i.e. social media users) in the face of incomplete non-privacy-sensitive profile data. Named ICD-IPD, the proposed approach first extracts account pairs with similar usernames or screen names from a given set of user accounts collected from a social media. It then learns a multi-view representation associated with a given account and extracts two categories of features for every single account. These two categories of features include profile and Weighted Generalised Canonical Correlation Analysis (WGCCA)-based features that may potentially contain missing values. To counter the impact of such missing values, a missing value imputer will next impute the missing values of the aforementioned profile and WGCCA-based features. After that, the proposed approach further extracts two categories of augmented features for each account pair identified previously, namely, 1) similarity and 2) differences-based features. Finally, these features are concatenated and fed into a Light Gradient Boosting Machine classifier to detect identity cloning. We evaluated and compared the proposed approach against the existing state-of-the-art identity cloning approaches and other machine or deep learning models atop a real-world dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and models in terms of Precision, Recall and F1-score.

Ahmed Alharbi, Hai Dong, Xun Yi

Recent years have witnessed a rising trend in social-sensor cloud identity cloning incidents. However, existing approaches suffer from unsatisfactory performance, a lack of solutions for detecting duplicated accounts, and a lack of large-scale evaluations on real-world datasets. We introduce a novel method for detecting identity cloning in social-sensor cloud service providers. Our proposed technique consists of two primary components: 1) a similar identity detection method and 2) a cryptography-based authentication protocol. Initially, we developed a weakly supervised deep forest model to identify similar identities using non-privacy-sensitive user profile features provided by the service. Subsequently, we designed a cryptography-based authentication protocol to verify whether similar identities were generated by the same provider. Our extensive experiments on a large real-world dataset demonstrate the feasibility and superior performance of our technique compared to current state-of-the-art identity clone detection methods.

Ahmed Alharbi, Hai Dong, Xun Yi et al.

We propose a novel method to detect identity cloning of social-sensor cloud service providers to prevent the detrimental outcomes caused by identity deception. This approach leverages non-privacy-sensitive user profile data gathered from social networks and a powerful deep learning model to perform cloned identity detection. We evaluated the proposed method against the state-of-the-art identity cloning detection techniques and the other popular identity deception detection models atop a real-world dataset. The results show that our method significantly outperforms these techniques/models in terms of Precision and F1-score.

Ahmed Alharbi, Hai Dong, Xun Yi et al.

Social media have been growing rapidly and become essential elements of many people's lives. Meanwhile, social media have also come to be a popular source for identity deception. Many social media identity deception cases have arisen over the past few years. Recent studies have been conducted to prevent and detect identity deception. This survey analyses various identity deception attacks, which can be categorized into fake profile, identity theft and identity cloning. This survey provides a detailed review of social media identity deception detection techniques. It also identifies primary research challenges and issues in the existing detection techniques. This article is expected to benefit both researchers and social media providers.

Ahmed Alharbi, Hai Dong

This paper explores an effective machine learning approach to predict cloud market performance for cloud consumers, providers and investors based on social media. We identified a set of comprehensive subjective metrics that may affect cloud market performance via literature survey. We used a popular sentiment analysis technique to process customer reviews collected from social media. Cloud market revenue growth was selected as an indicator of cloud market performance. We considered the revenue growth of Amazon Web Services as the stakeholder of our experiments. Three machine learning models were selected: linear regression, artificial neural network, and support vector machine. These models were compared with a time series prediction model. We found that the set of subjective metrics is able to improve the prediction performance for all the models. The support vector machine showed the best prediction results compared to the other models.