Multi-View Low-Rank Coding-Based Network Data De-Anonymization

Abstract

Social networks are extensively exploited by third-party consumers such as researchers and advertisers to understand user characteristics and behaviors. In general, before network data is published, sensitive relationships should be anonymized to prevent the compromise of individual privacy. To quantify the guarantee level of privacy-preserving mechanisms and mitigate users' privacy concerns, numerous studies concerning network data de-anonymization have been carried out. However, most existing studies focus on single-view data, and privacy protection for multi-view data that is ubiquitous in the era of big data has not been yet extensively explored. In this study, we are interested in answering the following question: Are the traditional privacy protection methods still valid for the anonymization of multi-view data? In this study, we propose a Multi-View Low-Rank Coding (MVLRC) based network data de-anonymization framework to assess the vulnerability of privacy protection techniques by accurately reconstructing a large portion of the original data. Specifically, the framework assumes that in principle, the target and auxiliary networks have common structural patterns, and they can be modeled together to infer the hidden structure of the target network. The essential components of our work include the following: (1) a robust network representation model for structural pattern learning; (2) the network representation based multi-view modeling of target network and auxiliary network; (3) the inference of the anonymized links via target network reconstruction. Experimental results on synthetic networks and three real-world networks demonstrate that auxiliary networks can be utilized by malicious adversaries for privacy inference attacks. Thus, the privacy protection of multi-view network data needs more sophisticated anonymization techniques.

Keywords

• Privacy preserving
• de-anonymization
• network data
• multi-view learning
• low-rank coding