De-anonymization of Social Networks with Communities: When Quantifications Meet Algorithms
This addresses privacy risks in social networks by improving re-identification techniques, though it appears incremental by building on existing de-anonymization approaches.
The paper tackles de-anonymization of social networks by developing new cost functions based on community structures and proposing algorithms to minimize them, achieving superior mapping accuracy compared to prior methods.
A crucial privacy-driven issue nowadays is re-identifying anonymized social networks by mapping them to correlated cross-domain auxiliary networks. Prior works are typically based on modeling social networks as random graphs representing users and their relations, and subsequently quantify the quality of mappings through cost functions that are proposed without sufficient rationale. Also, it remains unknown how to algorithmically meet the demand of such quantifications, i.e., to find the minimizer of the cost functions. We address those concerns in a more realistic social network modeling parameterized by community structures that can be leveraged as side information for de-anonymization. By Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation, our first contribution is new and well justified cost functions, which, when minimized, enjoy superiority to previous ones in finding the correct mapping with the highest probability. The feasibility of the cost functions is then for the first time algorithmically characterized. While proving the general multiplicative inapproximability, we are able to propose two algorithms, which, respectively, enjoy an ε-additive approximation and a conditional optimality in carrying out successful user re-identification. Our theoretical findings are empirically validated, with a notable dataset extracted from rare true cross-domain networks that reproduce genuine social network de-anonymization. Both theoretical and empirical observations also manifest the importance of community information in enhancing privacy inferencing.