1,475 research outputs found
An Automated Social Graph De-anonymization Technique
We present a generic and automated approach to re-identifying nodes in
anonymized social networks which enables novel anonymization techniques to be
quickly evaluated. It uses machine learning (decision forests) to matching
pairs of nodes in disparate anonymized sub-graphs. The technique uncovers
artefacts and invariants of any black-box anonymization scheme from a small set
of examples. Despite a high degree of automation, classification succeeds with
significant true positive rates even when small false positive rates are
sought. Our evaluation uses publicly available real world datasets to study the
performance of our approach against real-world anonymization strategies, namely
the schemes used to protect datasets of The Data for Development (D4D)
Challenge. We show that the technique is effective even when only small numbers
of samples are used for training. Further, since it detects weaknesses in the
black-box anonymization scheme it can re-identify nodes in one social network
when trained on another.Comment: 12 page
Link Prediction by De-anonymization: How We Won the Kaggle Social Network Challenge
This paper describes the winning entry to the IJCNN 2011 Social Network
Challenge run by Kaggle.com. The goal of the contest was to promote research on
real-world link prediction, and the dataset was a graph obtained by crawling
the popular Flickr social photo sharing website, with user identities scrubbed.
By de-anonymizing much of the competition test set using our own Flickr crawl,
we were able to effectively game the competition. Our attack represents a new
application of de-anonymization to gaming machine learning contests, suggesting
changes in how future competitions should be run.
We introduce a new simulated annealing-based weighted graph matching
algorithm for the seeding step of de-anonymization. We also show how to combine
de-anonymization with link prediction---the latter is required to achieve good
performance on the portion of the test set not de-anonymized---for example by
training the predictor on the de-anonymized portion of the test set, and
combining probabilistic predictions from de-anonymization and link prediction.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures; submitted to IJCNN'201
Privacy risk and de-anonymization in heterogeneous information networks
Anonymized user datasets are often released for research or industry applications. As an example, t.qq.com released its anonymized users’ profile, social interaction, and recommendation log data in KDD Cup 2012 to call for recommendation algorithms. Since the entities (users and so on) and edges (links among entities) are of multiple types, the released social network is a heterogeneous information network. Prior work has shown how privacy can be compromised in homogeneous information networks by the use of specific types of graph patterns. We show how the extra information derived from heterogeneity can be used to relax these assumptions. To characterize and demonstrate this added threat, we formally define privacy risk in an anonymized heterogeneous information network to identify the vulnerability in the possible way such data are released, and further present a new de-anonymization attack that exploits the vulnerability. Our attack successfully de-anonymized most individuals involved in the data. We further show that the general ideas of exploiting privacy risk and de-anonymizing heterogeneous information networks can be extended to more general graphs
Generating realistic scaled complex networks
Research on generative models is a central project in the emerging field of
network science, and it studies how statistical patterns found in real networks
could be generated by formal rules. Output from these generative models is then
the basis for designing and evaluating computational methods on networks, and
for verification and simulation studies. During the last two decades, a variety
of models has been proposed with an ultimate goal of achieving comprehensive
realism for the generated networks. In this study, we (a) introduce a new
generator, termed ReCoN; (b) explore how ReCoN and some existing models can be
fitted to an original network to produce a structurally similar replica, (c)
use ReCoN to produce networks much larger than the original exemplar, and
finally (d) discuss open problems and promising research directions. In a
comparative experimental study, we find that ReCoN is often superior to many
other state-of-the-art network generation methods. We argue that ReCoN is a
scalable and effective tool for modeling a given network while preserving
important properties at both micro- and macroscopic scales, and for scaling the
exemplar data by orders of magnitude in size.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures, extended version, a preliminary version of the
paper was presented at the 5th International Workshop on Complex Networks and
their Application
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