Title
Why Waldo befriended the dummy? k-Anonymization of social networks with pseudo-nodes.
Abstract
For a graph-based representation of a social network, the identity of participants can be uniquely determined if an adversary has background structural knowledge about the graph. We focus on degree-based attacks, wherein the adversary knows the degrees of particular target vertices and we aim to protect the anonymity of participants through k-anonymization, which ensures that every participant is equivalent to at least k − 1 other participants with respect to degree. We introduce a natural and novel approach of introducing “dummy” participants into the network and linking them to each other and to real participants in order to achieve this anonymity. The advantage of our approach lies in the nature of the results that we derive. We show that if participants have labels associated with them, the problem of anonymizing a subset of participants is NP-Complete. On the other hand, in the absence of labels, we give an \(\mathcal{O}(nk)\) algorithm to optimally k-anonymize a subset of participants or to near-optimally k-anonymize all real and all dummy participants. For degree-based-attacks, such theoretical guarantees are novel.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/s13278-012-0084-6
Social Netw. Analys. Mining
Keywords
Field
DocType
Privacy, k-Anonymization, Social networks, Complexity, Dynamic programming
Dynamic programming,Graph,Social network,Vertex (geometry),Computer security,Theoretical computer science,Adversary,Anonymity,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
3
3
1869-5469
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.60
26
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sean Chester113912.70
Bruce M. Kapron230826.02
Ganesh Ramesh31668.91
Gautam Srivastava435969.28
Alex Thomo541849.02
Srinivasan Venkatesh613610.67