TY - GEN
T1 - Link privacy in social networks
AU - Korolova, Aleksandra
AU - Motwani, Rajeev
AU - Nabar, Shubha U.
AU - Xu, Ying
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=52649105864&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=52649105864&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICDE.2008.4497554
DO - 10.1109/ICDE.2008.4497554
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:52649105864
SN - 9781424418374
T3 - Proceedings - International Conference on Data Engineering
SP - 1355
EP - 1357
BT - Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE'08
T2 - 2008 IEEE 24th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE'08
Y2 - 7 April 2008 through 12 April 2008
ER -