Elements of information theory
Elements of information theory
Foundations of statistical natural language processing
Foundations of statistical natural language processing
Fast dictionary attacks on passwords using time-space tradeoff
Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Duplicate Record Detection: A Survey
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Estimating the selectivity of tf-idf based cosine similarity predicates
ACM SIGMOD Record
All your contacts are belong to us: automated identity theft attacks on social networks
Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
De-anonymizing Social Networks
SP '09 Proceedings of the 2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Large Online Social Footprints--An Emerging Threat
CSE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Volume 03
CAPTCHA: using hard AI problems for security
EUROCRYPT'03 Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Theory and applications of cryptographic techniques
How unique is your web browser?
PETS'10 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Privacy enhancing technologies
Abusing social networks for automated user profiling
RAID'10 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Recent advances in intrusion detection
Is more always merrier?: a deep dive into online social footprints
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on Workshop on online social networks
Studying User Footprints in Different Online Social Networks
ASONAM '12 Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2012)
On the linkability of complementary information from free versions of people databases
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
Connecting users across social media sites: a behavioral-modeling approach
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
@i seek 'fb.me': identifying users across multiple online social networks
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion
RESLVE: leveraging user interest to improve entity disambiguation on short text
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion
Exploiting innocuous activity for correlating users across sites
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
Detecting multiple aliases in social media
Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
Honeywords: making password-cracking detectable
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
Privacy awareness about information leakage: who knows what about me?
Proceedings of the 12th ACM workshop on Workshop on privacy in the electronic society
The password allocation problem: strategies for reusing passwords effectively
Proceedings of the 12th ACM workshop on Workshop on privacy in the electronic society
Journal of Information Science
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Usernames are ubiquitously used for identification and authentication purposes on web services and the Internet at large, ranging from the local-part of email addresses to identifiers in social networks. Usernames are generally alphanumerical strings chosen by the users and, by design, are unique within the scope of a single organization or web service. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of using usernames to trace or link multiple profiles across services that belong to the same individual. The intuition is that the probability that two usernames refer to the same physical person strongly depends on the "entropy" of the username string itself. Our experiments, based on usernames gathered from real web services, show that a significant portion of the users' profiles can be linked using their usernames. In collecting the data needed for our study, we also show that users tend to choose a small number of related usernames and use them across many services. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that usernames are considered as a source of information when profiling users on the Internet.