Wherefore art thou r3579x?: anonymized social networks, hidden patterns, and structural steganography

  • Authors:
  • Lars Backstrom;Cynthia Dwork;Jon Kleinberg

  • Affiliations:
  • Cornell University, Ithaca, NY;Microsoft, Mountain View, CA;Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In a social network, nodes correspond topeople or other social entities, and edges correspond to social links between them. In an effort to preserve privacy, the practice of anonymization replaces names with meaningless unique identifiers. We describe a family of attacks such that even from a single anonymized copy of a social network, it is possible for an adversary to learn whether edges exist or not between specific targeted pairs of nodes.