Axioms for vulnerability measurement of online social network profiles

Abstract

The increase in online social network (OSN) usage has led to personal details known as attributes being readily displayed in online profiles. This can lead to the profile owners being vulnerable to social engineering attacks. Our vulnerability model is based upon a way to quantify the vulnerability of a profile and consists of three components. The individual vulnerability is determined by the presence of values for the profile attributes which may contribute towards the composite personal vulnerability via a weight based system. The relative vulnerability indicates the contribution of collective vulnerability of the profile's friends, whereas the absolute vulnerability is the overall composite vulnerability for the profile by considering the contributions of the individual and relative vulnerabilities. In this paper we introduce a set of axioms on probability dependent effect of profile attributes and probability change for OSN profiles. The research offers a formal background for future work on estimating how attribute changes for an OSN profile influence the individual vulnerability of the profile and validating this composite model.