Abstract

Pervasive Online Social Networks (POSNs) are the extensions of Online Social Networks (OSNs) which facilitate connectivity irrespective of the domain and properties of users. POSNs have been accumulated with the convergence of a plethora of social networking platforms with a motivation of bridging their gap. Over the last decade, OSNs have visually perceived an altogether tremendous amount of advancement in terms of the number of users as well as technology enablers. A single OSN is the property of an organization, which ascertains smooth functioning of its accommodations for providing a quality experience to their users. However, with POSNs, multiple OSNs have coalesced through communities, circles, or only properties, which make service-provisioning tedious and arduous to sustain. Especially, challenges become rigorous when the focus is on the security perspective of cross-platform OSNs, which are an integral part of POSNs. Thus, it is of utmost paramountcy to highlight such a requirement and understand the current situation while discussing the available state-of-the-art. With the modernization of OSNs and convergence towards POSNs, it is compulsory to understand the impact and reach of current solutions for enhancing the security of users as well as associated services. This survey understands this requisite and fixates on different sets of studies presented over the last few years and surveys them for their applicability to POSNs. There is a limited amount of content available for the security of POSNs. However, being an extension to general OSNs, solutions applicable to OSNs are withal included to understand the practicality for POSNs. Moreover, this survey additionally includes content cognate to trust management and anomaly detection in POSNs. In integration, a broad classification is additionally presented for each category with a tabular comparison. At last, certain future challenges, open issues, and research goals are presented, which can be focused by leading or upcoming researchers while emphasizing the security of POSNs.