Edge Anonymity in Social Network Graphs

Edges in social network graphs can model sensitive relationships. In this paper, we consider the problem of edges anonymity in graphs. We propose a probabilistic notion of edge anonymity, called graph confidence, which is general enough to capture the privacy breach made by an adversary who is able to pinpoint target persons in a graph partition based on any given set of topological features of vertexes. We then focus on a special type of edge anonymity problem which uses vertex degree to partition a graph. We analyze edge disclosure in real-world social networks and show that even if graphs are anonymized to prevent vertex disclosure, they still do not guarantee edge anonymity. We present three heuristic algorithms that protect edge anonymity using edge swap or edge deletion. Our experimental results, based on three real-world social networks and several utility measures, show that these algorithms can effectively protect edge anonymity and obtain anonymous graphs of acceptable utilit...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: CSE
• Authors: Lijie Zhang, Weining Zhang
• Keywords: CSE 2009, Edge Anonymity, Real-world Social Networks, Social Networks, Theoretical Computer Science