
Collective Data-Sanitization for Preventing Sensitive Information Inference Attacks in Social Networks
Abstract of Collective Data-Sanitization for Preventing Sensitive Information
Collective Data-Sanitization for Preventing Sensitive Information
Collective Data-Sanitization for Preventing Sensitive Information Inference Attacks in Social Networks.Releasing social network data could seriously breach user privacy. User profile and friendship relations are inherently private. Unfortunately, sensitive information may be predicted out of released data through data mining techniques. Therefore, sanitizing network data prior to release is necessary. In this paper, we explore how to launch an inference attack exploiting social networks with a mixture of non-sensitive attributes and social relationships. We map this issue to a collective classification problem and propose a collective inference model. In our model, an attacker utilizes user profile and social relationships in a collective manner to predict sensitive information of related victims in a released social network dataset. To protect against such attacks, we propose a data sanitization method collectively manipulating user profile and friendship relations. Besides sanitizing friendship relations, the proposed method can take advantages of various data-manipulating methods.