1,107 research outputs found
Anonymizing Social Graphs via Uncertainty Semantics
Rather than anonymizing social graphs by generalizing them to super
nodes/edges or adding/removing nodes and edges to satisfy given privacy
parameters, recent methods exploit the semantics of uncertain graphs to achieve
privacy protection of participating entities and their relationship. These
techniques anonymize a deterministic graph by converting it into an uncertain
form. In this paper, we propose a generalized obfuscation model based on
uncertain adjacency matrices that keep expected node degrees equal to those in
the unanonymized graph. We analyze two recently proposed schemes and show their
fitting into the model. We also point out disadvantages in each method and
present several elegant techniques to fill the gap between them. Finally, to
support fair comparisons, we develop a new tradeoff quantifying framework by
leveraging the concept of incorrectness in location privacy research.
Experiments on large social graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our
schemes
Preserving Link Privacy in Social Network Based Systems
A growing body of research leverages social network based trust relationships
to improve the functionality of the system. However, these systems expose
users' trust relationships, which is considered sensitive information in
today's society, to an adversary.
In this work, we make the following contributions. First, we propose an
algorithm that perturbs the structure of a social graph in order to provide
link privacy, at the cost of slight reduction in the utility of the social
graph. Second we define general metrics for characterizing the utility and
privacy of perturbed graphs. Third, we evaluate the utility and privacy of our
proposed algorithm using real world social graphs. Finally, we demonstrate the
applicability of our perturbation algorithm on a broad range of secure systems,
including Sybil defenses and secure routing.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figure
Using Metrics Suites to Improve the Measurement of Privacy in Graphs
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Social graphs are widely used in research (e.g., epidemiology) and business (e.g., recommender systems). However, sharing these graphs poses privacy risks because they contain sensitive information about individuals. Graph anonymization techniques aim to protect individual users in a graph, while graph de-anonymization aims to re-identify users. The effectiveness of anonymization and de-anonymization algorithms is usually evaluated with privacy metrics. However, it is unclear how strong existing privacy metrics are when they are used in graph privacy. In this paper, we study 26 privacy metrics for graph anonymization and de-anonymization and evaluate their strength in terms of three criteria: monotonicity indicates whether the metric indicates lower privacy for stronger adversaries; for within-scenario comparisons, evenness indicates whether metric values are spread evenly; and for between-scenario comparisons, shared value range indicates whether metrics use a consistent value range across scenarios. Our extensive experiments indicate that no single metric fulfills all three criteria perfectly. We therefore use methods from multi-criteria decision analysis to aggregate multiple metrics in a metrics suite, and we show that these metrics suites improve monotonicity compared to the best individual metric. This important result enables more monotonic, and thus more accurate, evaluations of new graph anonymization and de-anonymization algorithms
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
Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments
Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple
authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by
all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially
adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and
privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for
designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance
privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in
terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of
decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by
designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography,
distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of
adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful
privacy-preserving decentralized systems
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