Wherefore Art Thou R3579X? Anonymized Social
Networks
Hidden Patterns and Structural Steganography
Lars Backstrom
Cornell University
Abstract:
In a social network, nodes correspond to people 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.