[Hackmeeting] De-anonymizing Social Networks

Delete this message

Reply to this message
Author: packz
Date:  
To: hackmeeting
Subject: [Hackmeeting] De-anonymizing Social Networks
<http://randomwalker.info/social-networks/index.html>

Abstract:

Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially
sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers,
application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically
protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc.

We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social
networks and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized
social-network graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world
networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have
accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an
online photo-sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter
graph with only a 12% error rate.

Our de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network topology,
does not require creation of a large number of dummy "sybil" nodes, is
robust to noise and all existing defenses, and works even when the overlap
between the target network and the adversary's auxiliary information is small.


- --
"Per trasmettere 1 bit di informazione in un ambiente a temperatura T si
necessitano kTln2 joule di energia"

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys E25ED3A9

web site http://www.autistici.org/packz
blog     http://packz.noblogs.org