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
