Social Network De-anonymization: More Adversarial Knowledge, More Users Re-Identified?

Abstract

Following the trend of data trading and data publishing, many online social networks have enabled potentially sensitive data to be exchanged or shared on the web. As a result, users' privacy could be exposed to malicious third parties since they are extremely vulnerable to de-anonymization attacks, i.e., the attacker links the anonymous nodes in the social network to their real identities with the help of background knowledge. Previous work in social network de-anonymization mostly focuses on designing accurate and efficient de-anonymization methods. We study this topic from a different perspective and attempt to investigate the intrinsic relation between the attacker's knowledge and the expected de-anonymization gain. One common intuition is that the more auxiliary information the attacker has, the more accurate de-anonymization becomes. However, their relation is much more sophisticated than that. To simplify the problem, we attempt to quantify background knowledge and de-anonymization gain under several assumptions. Our theoretical analysis and simulations on synthetic and real network data show that more background knowledge may not necessarily lead to more de-anonymization gain in certain cases. Though our analysis is based on a few assumptions, the findings still leave intriguing implications for the attacker to make better use of the background knowledge when performing de-anonymization, and for the data owners to better measure the privacy risk when releasing their data to third parties.