Analysis of three trusted friends' vulnerability in Facebook

Abstract

With about 1 billion users, Facebook nowadays is the most popular and famous social networking site (SNS) around the globe. It is one of the Internet's biggest success stories. Facebook gets hundreds of new users every day because of the incredible spread of the network. One specific aspect of this social network site that widely discussed in the news and heavily researched in academic circles is the security and privacy issues of Facebook. Facebook provides different security mechanisms and one of these mechanism is a facility known as 3 trusted friends that Facebook provide to its users to recover their accounts in case that they forget their passwords which it could be a vulnerability as well if it is misused by malicious person. The purpose of this paper is to introduce this new 3 trusted friend's vulnerability that could be exploited by a hacker to recover the password of a legitimate user and hack his account