Blind De-anonymization Attacks using Social Networks

Abstract

It is important to study the risks of publishing privacy-sensitive data. Even if sensitive identities (e.g., name, social security number) were removed and advanced data perturbation techniques were applied, several de-anonymization attacks have been proposed to re-identify individuals. However, existing attacks have some limitations: 1) they are limited in de-anonymization accuracy; 2) they require prior seed knowledge and suffer from the imprecision of such seed information. We propose a novel structure-based de-anonymization attack, which does not require the attacker to have prior information (e.g., seeds). Our attack is based on two key insights: using multihop neighborhood information, and optimizing the process of deanonymization by exploiting enhanced machine learning techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is robust to data perturbations and significantly outperforms the stateof- the-art de-anonymization techniques by up to 10× improvement.