Conditional adjacency anonymity in social graphs under active attacks

Social network data is typically made available in a graph format, where users and their relations are represented by vertices and edges, respectively. In doing so, social graphs need to be anonymised to resist various privacy attacks. Among these, the so-called active attacks, where an adversary has the ability to enrol sybil accounts in the social network, have proven difficult to counteract. In this article, we provide an anonymisation technique that successfully thwarts active attacks while causing low structural perturbation. We achieve this goal by introducing (k, Γ G,ℓ) -adjacency anonymity: a privacy property based on (k, ℓ) -anonymity that alleviates the computational burden suffered by anonymisation algorithms based on (k, ℓ) -anonymity and relaxes some of its assumptions on the adversary capabilities. We show that the proposed method is efficient and establish tight bounds on the number of modifications that it performs on the original graph. Experimental results on real-life and randomly generated graphs show that when compared to methods based on (k, ℓ) -anonymity, the new method continues to provide protection from equally capable active attackers while introducing a much smaller number of changes in the graph structure

Modeling, analysis, and optimization for wireless networks in the presence of heavy tails

The heavy-tailed traffic from wireless users, caused by the emerging Internet and multimedia applications, induces extremely dynamic and variable network environment, which can fundamentally change the way in which wireless networks are conceived, designed, and operated. This thesis is concerned with modeling, analysis, and optimization of wireless networks in the presence of heavy tails. First, a novel traffic model is proposed, which captures the inherent relationship between the traffic dynamics and the joint effects of the mobility variability of network users and the spatial correlation in their observed physical phenomenon. Next, the asymptotic delay distribution of wireless users is analyzed under different traffic patterns and spectrum conditions, which reveals the critical conditions under which wireless users can experience heavy-tailed delay with significantly degraded QoS performance. Based on the delay analysis, the fundamental impact of heavy-tailed environment on network stability is studied. Specifically, a new network stability criterion, namely moment stability, is introduced to better characterize the QoS performance in the heavy-tailed environment. Accordingly, a throughput-optimal scheduling algorithm is proposed to maximize network throughput while guaranteeing moment stability. Furthermore, the impact of heavy-tailed spectrum on network connectivity is investigated. Towards this, the necessary conditions on the existence of delay-bounded connectivity are derived. To enhance network connectivity, the mobility-assisted data forwarding scheme is exploited, whose important design parameters, such as critical mobility radius, are derived. Moreover, the latency in wireless mobile networks is analyzed, which exhibits asymptotic linearity in the initial distance between mobile users.Ph.D