Link Privacy in Social Networks

@inproceedings{citeulike:2797173, abstract = {We consider a privacy threat to a social network in which the goal of an attacker is to obtain knowledge of a significant fraction of the links in the network. We formalize the typical social network interface and the information about links that it provides to its users in terms of lookahead. We consider a particular threat in which an attacker subverts user accounts to gain information about local neighborhoods in the network and pieces them together in order to build a global picture. We analyze, both experimentally and theoretically, the number of user accounts an attacker would need to subvert for a successful attack, as a function of his strategy for choosing users whose accounts to subvert and a function of the lookahead provided by the network. We conclude that such an attack is feasible in practice, and thus any social network that wishes to protect the link privacy of its users should take great care in choosing the lookahead of its interface, limiting it to 1 or 2, whenever possible.}, author = {Korolova, Aleksandra and Motwani, Rajeev and Nabar, Shubha U. and Xu, Ying }, booktitle = {Data Engineering, 2008. ICDE 2008. IEEE 24th International Conference on}, citeulike-article-id = {2797173}, doi = {10.1109/ICDE.2008.4497554}, journal = {Data Engineering, 2008. ICDE 2008. IEEE 24th International Conference on}, keywords = {anonymity, privacy, social-networks, social-privacy, yrbcn}, pages = {1355--1357}, posted-at = {2008-05-16 15:18:18}, priority = {2}, title = {Link Privacy in Social Networks}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICDE.2008.4497554}, year = {2008} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:2797173 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2797173 TI - Link Privacy in Social Networks T2 - Data Engineering, 2008. ICDE 2008. IEEE 24th International Conference on JF - Data Engineering, 2008. ICDE 2008. IEEE 24th International Conference on SP - 1355 EP - 1357 N2 - We consider a privacy threat to a social network in which the goal of an attacker is to obtain knowledge of a significant fraction of the links in the network. We formalize the typical social network interface and the information about links that it provides to its users in terms of lookahead. We consider a particular threat in which an attacker subverts user accounts to gain information about local neighborhoods in the network and pieces them together in order to build a global picture. We analyze, both experimentally and theoretically, the number of user accounts an attacker would need to subvert for a successful attack, as a function of his strategy for choosing users whose accounts to subvert and a function of the lookahead provided by the network. We conclude that such an attack is feasible in practice, and thus any social network that wishes to protect the link privacy of its users should take great care in choosing the lookahead of its interface, limiting it to 1 or 2, whenever possible. KW - anonymity KW - privacy KW - social-networks KW - social-privacy KW - yrbcn AU - Korolova, Aleksandra AU - Motwani, Rajeev AU - Nabar, Shubha AU - Xu, Ying PY - 2008/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICDE.2008.4497554 ER -