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Hiding information against structural re-identification

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Abstract

Connections between users of social networking services pose a significant privacy threat. Recently, several social network de-anonymization attacks have been proposed that can efficiently re-identify users at large scale, solely considering the graph structure. In this paper, we consider these privacy threats and analyze de-anonymization attacks at the model level against a user-controlled privacy-enhancing technique called identity separation. The latter allows creating seemingly unrelated identities in parallel, even without the consent of the service provider or other users. It has been shown that identity separation can be used efficiently against re-identification attacks if user cooperate with each other. However, while participation would be crucial, this cannot be granted in a real-life scenario. Therefore, we introduce the y-identity model, in which the user creates multiple separated identities and assigns the sensitive attribute to one of them according to a given strategy. For this, we propose a strategy to be used in real-life situations and formally prove that there is a higher bound for the expected privacy loss which is sufficiently low.

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Notes

  1. Wikipedia on pen names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_name

  2. Albine Maskme providing disposable emails: https://www.abine.com/maskme/

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Levente Buttyán, István Vajda and Benedek Simon for the fruitful conversations. We are very grateful for Márk Félegyházi and Tamás Holczer for reviewing draft versions of this paper and for engaging us in meaningful discussions. We would like to also thank the useful comments and suggestions of Gergely Biczók and also for reviewing the y-identity model in details. The authors are thankful for the comments and suggestions provided by the members of the CrySyS reading group.

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  1. Privatics Team, INRIA, Montbonnot, France

    Gábor György Gulyás

  2. Mobile Communications and Quantum Technologies Laboratory (MCL), Department of Networked Systems and Services, BME, Budapest, Hungary

    Sándor Imre

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Correspondence to Gábor György Gulyás .

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Gulyás , G.G., Imre, S. Hiding information against structural re-identification. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 18, 125–139 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-018-0400-x

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