X-Vine: Secure and Pseudonymous Routing Using Social Networks

Distributed hash tables suffer from several security and privacy vulnerabilities, including the problem of Sybil attacks. Existing social network-based solutions to mitigate the Sybil attacks in DHT routing have a high state requirement and do not provide an adequate level of privacy. For instance, such techniques require a user to reveal their social network contacts. We design X-Vine, a protection mechanism for distributed hash tables that operates entirely by communicating over social network links. As with traditional peer-to-peer systems, X-Vine provides robustness, scalability, and a platform for innovation. The use of social network links for communication helps protect participant privacy and adds a new dimension of trust absent from previous designs. X-Vine is resilient to denial of service via Sybil attacks, and in fact is the first Sybil defense that requires only a logarithmic amount of state per node, making it suitable for large-scale and dynamic settings. X-Vine also helps protect the privacy of users social network contacts and keeps their IP addresses hidden from those outside of their social circle, providing a basis for pseudonymous communication. We first evaluate our design with analysis and simulations, using several real world large-scale social networking topologies. We show that the constraints of X-Vine allow the insertion of only a logarithmic number of Sybil identities per attack edge; we show this mitigates the impact of malicious attacks while not affecting the performance of honest nodes. Moreover, our algorithms are efficient, maintain low stretch, and avoid hot spots in the network. We validate our design with a PlanetLab implementation and a Facebook plugin.Comment: 15 page

Mining Maximal Cliques from an Uncertain Graph

We consider mining dense substructures (maximal cliques) from an uncertain graph, which is a probability distribution on a set of deterministic graphs. For parameter 0 < {\alpha} < 1, we present a precise definition of an {\alpha}-maximal clique in an uncertain graph. We present matching upper and lower bounds on the number of {\alpha}-maximal cliques possible within an uncertain graph. We present an algorithm to enumerate {\alpha}-maximal cliques in an uncertain graph whose worst-case runtime is near-optimal, and an experimental evaluation showing the practical utility of the algorithm.Comment: ICDE 201

Enumerating Maximal Bicliques from a Large Graph using MapReduce

We consider the enumeration of maximal bipartite cliques (bicliques) from a large graph, a task central to many practical data mining problems in social network analysis and bioinformatics. We present novel parallel algorithms for the MapReduce platform, and an experimental evaluation using Hadoop MapReduce. Our algorithm is based on clustering the input graph into smaller sized subgraphs, followed by processing different subgraphs in parallel. Our algorithm uses two ideas that enable it to scale to large graphs: (1) the redundancy in work between different subgraph explorations is minimized through a careful pruning of the search space, and (2) the load on different reducers is balanced through the use of an appropriate total order among the vertices. Our evaluation shows that the algorithm scales to large graphs with millions of edges and tens of mil- lions of maximal bicliques. To our knowledge, this is the first work on maximal biclique enumeration for graphs of this scale.Comment: A preliminary version of the paper was accepted at the Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Congress on Big Data 201

Proof-of-Concept Application - Annual Report Year 1

In this document the Cat-COVITE Application for use in the CATNETS Project is introduced and motivated. Furthermore an introduction to the catallactic middleware and Web Services Agreement (WS-Agreement) concepts is given as a basis for the future work. Requirements for the application of Cat-COVITE with in catallactic systems are analysed. Finally the integration of the Cat-COVITE application and the catallactic middleware is described. --Grid Computing