We propose a novel approach to effectively detect cloned identities of social-sensor cloud service providers (i.e. social media users) in the face of incomplete non-privacy-sensitive profile data. Named ICD-IPD, the proposed approach first extracts account pairs with similar usernames or screen names from a given set of user accounts collected from a social media. It then learns a multi-view representation associated with a given account and extracts two categories of features for every single account. These two categories of features include profile and Weighted Generalised Canonical Correlation Analysis (WGCCA)-based features that may potentially contain missing values. To counter the impact of such missing values, a missing value imputer will next impute the missing values of the aforementioned profile and WGCCA-based features. After that, the proposed approach further extracts two categories of augmented features for each account pair identified previously, namely, 1) similarity and 2) differences-based features. Finally, these features are concatenated and fed into a Light Gradient Boosting Machine classifier to detect identity cloning. We evaluated and compared the proposed approach against the existing state-of-the-art identity cloning approaches and other machine or deep learning models atop a real-world dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and models in terms of Precision, Recall and F1-score.

Social sensing is a paradigm that allows crowd-sourcing data from humans and devices. This sensed data (e.g. social network posts) can be hosted in social-sensor clouds (i.e. social networks) and delivered as social-sensor cloud services (SocSen services). These services can be identified by their providers' social network accounts. Attackers intrude social-sensor clouds by cloning SocSen service providers' user profiles to deceive social-sensor cloud users. We propose a novel unsupervised SocSen service provider identity cloning detection approach, NPS-AntiClone, to prevent the detrimental outcomes caused by such identity deception. This approach leverages non-privacy-sensitive user profile data gathered from social networks to perform cloned identity detection. It consists of three main components: 1) a multi-view account representation model, 2) an embedding learning model and 3) a prediction model. The multi-view account representation model forms three different views for a given identity, namely a post view, a network view and a profile attribute view. The embedding learning model learns a single embedding from the generated multi-view representation using Weighted Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis. Finally, NPS-AntiClone calculates the cosine similarity between two accounts' embedding to predict whether these two accounts contain a cloned account and its victim. We evaluated our proposed approach using a real-world dataset. The results showed that NPS-AntiClone significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art identity cloning detection techniques and machine learning approaches.