Tonight's Talk

As we move further into the big data era, people are motivated in numerous ways to proactively generate, share and exchange diverse digital contents online every day. While the increasing amount of information greatly facilitates people’s decision makings, it also brings great challenges. For example, driven by the huge profits behind the big data economy, malicious attacks are emerging rapidly to mislead normal users’ decision-making process by providing carefully crafted false information. In addition, retrieving tremendous amount of user private information has become a popular attack target.

This talk will discuss the security, trust and privacy issues in online social networks, the trend and challenges. In particular, three sample attacks will be discussed, including (1) Efficiently Promoting Product Online Outcome: An Iterative Rating Attack Utilizing Product and Market Property; (2) Retrieving Hidden Friends: A Collusion Privacy Attack Against Online Friend Search Engine; and (3) Is Social Diversity Related to Misinformation Resistance? An Empirical Study on Social Communities.

About Dr. Liu

Yuhong Liu, Associate Professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Santa Clara University, received her B.S. and M.S. degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2004 and 2007 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from University of Rhode Island in 2012. She is the recipient of the 2013 University of Rhode Island Graduate School Excellence in Doctoral Research Award. Her research interests include trustworthy computing and cyber security of emerging applications, such as online social media, Internet-of-things, and blockchain. Her work on securing online reputation systems received the best paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Social Computing 2010 (acceptance rate = 13%), and the 9th International Conference on Ubi-Media Computing (UMEDIA 2016). She also receives the Researcher of the Year Award at School of Engineering, Santa Clara University, 2019.