Link privacy in social networks

Aleksandra Korolova, Rajeev Motwani, Shubha U. Nabar, Ying Xu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

26 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2008 IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE'08
Pages1355-1357
Number of pages3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2008
Externally publishedYes
Event2008 IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE'08 - Cancun, Mexico
Duration: Apr 7 2008Apr 12 2008

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Data Engineering
ISSN (Print)1084-4627

Conference

Conference2008 IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE'08
Country/TerritoryMexico
CityCancun
Period4/7/084/12/08

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Information Systems

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