De-anonymizing Social Networks with Overlapping Community Structure

TL;DR

This paper introduces a theoretically justified cost function for social network de-anonymization leveraging overlapping community structures, transforming it into a tractable optimization problem and demonstrating high accuracy in experiments.

Contribution

It proposes a new cost function based on MMSE, proves its NP-hardness, and develops an algorithm (CBDA) that effectively solves the associated weighted-edge matching problem.

Findings

WEMP asymptotically achieves negligible error in large networks with dense overlaps.

CBDA algorithm finds the optimal solution for WEMP.

Overlapping communities significantly improve re-identification accuracy.

Abstract

The advent of social networks poses severe threats on user privacy as adversaries can de-anonymize users' identities by mapping them to correlated cross-domain networks. Without ground-truth mapping, prior literature proposes various cost functions in hope of measuring the quality of mappings. However, there is generally a lacking of rationale behind the cost functions, whose minimizer also remains algorithmically unknown. We jointly tackle above concerns under a more practical social network model parameterized by overlapping communities, which, neglected by prior art, can serve as side information for de-anonymization. Regarding the unavailability of ground-truth mapping to adversaries, by virtue of the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE), our first contribution is a well-justified cost function minimizing the expected number of mismatched users over all possible true mappings. While proving the NP-hardness of minimizing MMSE, we validly transform it into the weighted-edge matching problem (WEMP), which, as disclosed theoretically, resolves the tension between optimality and complexity: (i) WEMP asymptotically returns a negligible mapping error in large network size under mild conditions facilitated by higher overlapping strength; (ii) WEMP can be algorithmically characterized via the convex-concave based de-anonymization algorithm (CBDA), perfectly finding the optimum of WEMP. Extensive experiments further confirm the effectiveness of CBDA under overlapping communities, in terms of averagely 90% re-identified users in the rare true cross-domain co-author networks when communities overlap densely, and roughly 70% enhanced re-identification ratio compared to non-overlapping cases.