Title: Using non-verbal social signals and degree centrality to optimise a covert actor's detection scheme for a healthy networked community

Authors: Munene W. Kanampiu

Addresses: North Carolina A&T State University, Winston-Salem State University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

Abstract: Passive attacks are of the nature of eavesdropping on, monitoring of, transmissions where the attacker's goal is to unnoticeably obtain the information in transmission. Passive attacks are difficult to detect and therefore hard to prevent. The main focus for most research in this area has been on preventing the attacks rather than detecting the attacker for example by data encryption. But encryption by itself falls short because passive attack can occur in more ways than just observing exposed data. Encryption is also not always applicable for example in open wireless communication protocols. With these observations, we aim to design a scheme that reduces such attackers' capability. We introduce the non-verbal social signal deception detection in the investigative module while we optimise the scheme by putting in consideration a participant's centrality given the topology. The results are an intuitive scalable and optimised scheme that detects, investigates, and expels the guilty suspects.

Keywords: social networks; directed networks; centrality; indegree; outdegree; node popularity; node gregariousness; healthy networked communities; active attacks; passive attacks; benign covert actors; malicious covert actors; non-verbal social signals; deception detection; non-verbal signals; online communities; virtual communities; web based communities; attacker capability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIPSI.2014.062864

International Journal of Information Privacy, Security and Integrity, 2014 Vol.2 No.1, pp.21 - 36

Published online: 13 Sep 2014 *

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