Effective Social Graph Deanonymization Based on Graph Structure and Descriptive Information

Abstract

The study of online social networks has attracted increasing interest. However, concerns are raised for the privacy risks of user data since they have been frequently shared among researchers, advertisers, and application developers. To solve this problem, a number of anonymization algorithms have been recently developed for protecting the privacy of social graphs. In this article, we proposed a graph node similarity measurement in consideration with both graph structure and descriptive information, and a deanonymization algorithm based on the measurement. Using the proposed algorithm, we evaluated the privacy risks of several typical anonymization algorithms on social graphs with thousands of nodes from Microsoft Academic Search, LiveJournal, and the Enron email dataset, and a social graph with millions of nodes from Tencent Weibo. Our results showed that the proposed algorithm was efficient and effective to deanonymize social graphs without any initial seed mappings. Based on the experiments, we also pointed out suggestions on how to better maintain the data utility while preserving privacy.