A Low-cost, High-impact Node Injection Approach for Attacking Social Network Alignment

Abstract

Social network alignment (SNA) holds significant importance for various downstream applications, prompting numerous professionals to develop and share SNA tools. Unfortunately, these tools can be exploited by malicious actors to integrate sensitive user information, posing cybersecurity risks. While many researchers have explored attacking SNA (ASNA) through a network modification attack way, practical feasibility remains a challenge. This paper introduces a novel approach, the node injection attack. To overcome the problem of modeling and solving within a limited time and balancing costs and benefits, we propose a low-cost, high-impact node injection attack via dynamic programming (DPNIA) framework. DPNIA models ASNA as a problem of maximizing the number of confirmed incorrect correspondent node pairs who have a greater similarity scores than the pairs between existing nodes, making ASNA solvable. Meanwhile, it employs a cross-network evaluation method to identify node vulnerability, facilitating a progressive attack from easy to difficult. Additionally, it utilizes an optimal injection strategy searching method, based on dynamic programming, to determine which links should be added between injected nodes and existing nodes, thereby achieving a high impact for attack effectiveness at a low cost. Experiments on four real-world datasets consistently demonstrate that DPNIA consistently and significantly outperforms various attack baselines.