A Survey of Security and Privacy Research in Online Social Networks

This survey highlights the major issues concerning privacy and security in online social networks (OSNs). Firstly, we discuss research that aims to protect user data from the various attack vantage points including other users, advertisers, third party application developers, and the online social network provider itself. Next we cover social network inference of user attributes, locating hubs, and link prediction. Because online social networks are so saturated with sensitive information, network inference plays a major privacy role. As a response to the issues brought forth by client-server architectures, distributed social networks are discussed. We then cover the challenges that providers face in maintaining the proper operation of an online social network including minimizing spam messages, and reducing the number of sybil accounts. Finally, we present research in anonymizing social network data. This area is of particular interest in order to continue research in this field both in academia and in industry.