Segment-Based Injection Attacks against Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems

  • Authors:
  • Robin Burke;Bamshad Mobasher;Runa Bhaumik;Chad Williams

  • Affiliations:
  • DePaul University;DePaul University;DePaul University;DePaul University

  • Venue:
  • ICDM '05 Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Significant vulnerabilities have recently been identi- fied in collaborative filtering recommender systems. Researchers have shown that attackers can manipulate a system's recommendations by injecting biased profiles into it. In this paper, we examine attacks that concentrate on a targeted set of users with similar tastes, biasing the system's responses to these users. We show that such attacks are both pragmatically reasonable and also highly effective against both user-based and item-based algorithms. As a result, an attacker can mount such a "segmented" attack with little knowledge of the specific system being targeted and with strong likelihood of success.