Survey of Sybil Attacks in Social Networks

Abstract: This paper reviews the Sybil attack in social networks, which has the potential to compromise the whole distributed network. In the Sybil attack, the malicious user claims multiple identities to compromise the network. Sybil attacks can be used to change the overall ranking in voting applications, bad-mouth an opinion, access resources or to break the trust mechanism behind a P2P network. In this paper, different defense mechanisms used to mitigate Sybil attacks are also reviewed.