Composite Behavioral Modeling for Identity Theft Detection in Online Social Networks
It addresses real-time identity authentication for cybersecurity in social networks, offering an incremental improvement by leveraging complementary behavioral dimensions.
The paper tackles identity theft detection in online social networks by modeling users' composite behavioral patterns from multi-dimensional data, achieving AUC values of 0.956 and 0.947 on Foursquare and Yelp datasets with recall up to 72.2% at low false positive rates.
In this work, we aim at building a bridge from poor behavioral data to an effective, quick-response, and robust behavior model for online identity theft detection. We concentrate on this issue in online social networks (OSNs) where users usually have composite behavioral records, consisting of multi-dimensional low-quality data, e.g., offline check-ins and online user generated content (UGC). As an insightful result, we find that there is a complementary effect among different dimensions of records for modeling users' behavioral patterns. To deeply exploit such a complementary effect, we propose a joint model to capture both online and offline features of a user's composite behavior. We evaluate the proposed joint model by comparing with some typical models on two real-world datasets: Foursquare and Yelp. In the widely-used setting of theft simulation (simulating thefts via behavioral replacement), the experimental results show that our model outperforms the existing ones, with the AUC values $0.956$ in Foursquare and $0.947$ in Yelp, respectively. Particularly, the recall (True Positive Rate) can reach up to $65.3\%$ in Foursquare and $72.2\%$ in Yelp with the corresponding disturbance rate (False Positive Rate) below $1\%$. It is worth mentioning that these performances can be achieved by examining only one composite behavior (visiting a place and posting a tip online simultaneously) per authentication, which guarantees the low response latency of our method. This study would give the cybersecurity community new insights into whether and how a real-time online identity authentication can be improved via modeling users' composite behavioral patterns.