Authentication schemes for social network users: a review

Social networks have been very successful for information sharing due to the rapid development of communication and networking. As the technology modernised and many unprotected types of equipment are used in sharing information like events, knowledge, activities, etc., there is a need for a high protection of social networking sites by providing dynamic authentication for social networks users. It is no longer a question of determining whether a user is who or what he/she is declared to be, but it is essential to design a convenient and credible authentication based on activity, relation, etc., of users. Managing and handling such authentication of users is complex and hard for which broad range of technologies need to be called. In this paper, we review some of the existing authentication schemes for social network users. Mainly, we highlight advantages of the existing schemes along with some of the improvements that can be incorporated. We also highlight some of the attacks and their prevention in social networks.