TWC: Small: Collaborative: Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service: Analyses and Defenses

生活在一个服务经常被评级的时代，人们在网上购物时越来越依赖于卖家或产品/应用的声誉。这给人们带来了压力，要求他们通过提供可靠和高质量的服务和/或产品来获得和保持高声誉，从而造福于整个社会。不幸的是，由于电子商务或应用商店的竞争非常激烈，最近与声誉操纵相关的服务迅速发展成为一项规模可观的业务，被称为声誉升级即服务(Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service，REaaS)。随着REaaS攻击规模的扩大，必须设计有效的对策来检测和防御它们。本研究从两个方面对REAAS进行了研究。首先，它旨在通过对电子市场进行实证研究来理解REaaS的经济学。其次，它旨在制定防御性措施，既包括技术手段，也包括市场干预。技术方法侧重于从电子市场检测REaaS，并将利用内容分析、机器学习、社会关系和图论开发新的检测技术。对于市场创新，在对REAAS进行整体分析后，本研究旨在找出其瓶颈(最薄弱的环节)，并对干预的效果进行衡量。这项数据驱动的安全研究成果将加强基于社会经济数据分析的实验室的安全教育。这项研究的成功将引起业界、政府部门和学术界更多的关注，共同解决REAAS问题。

Living in an age when services are often rated, people are increasingly depending on reputation of sellers or products/apps when making purchases online. This puts pressure on people to gain and maintain a high reputation by offering reliable and high-quality services and/or products, which benefits the society at large. Unfortunately, due to extremely high competition in e-commerce or app stores, recently reputation manipulation related services have quickly developed into a sizable business, which is termed Reputation-Escalation-as-a-Service (REaaS). As REaaS attacks grow in scale, effective countermeasures must be designed to detect and defend against them. This research addresses REaaS from two aspects. First, it aims to understand the economics of REaaS by conducting empirical studies of e-markets. Second, it aims to develop defensive measures, which involve both technical approaches and market intervention. The technical approaches focus on detection of REaaS from e-markets, and novel detection techniques will be developed using content analysis, machine learning, social ties, and graph theory. For market invention, after a holistic analysis of REaaS, this research aims to identify its bottleneck (the weakest link) and also measure the efficacy of intervention. The outcome of this data-driven security research will enhance security education with labs based on social-economic data analysis. The success of this research will attract more attention of industry practitioners, government sectors, and academia to jointly tackle the REaaS problem.