Surrogate Parenthood: Protected and Informative Graphs

Many applications, including provenance and some analyses of social networks, require path-based queries over graphstructured data. When these graphs contain sensitive information, paths may be broken, resulting in uninformative query results. This paper presents innovative techniques that give users more informative graph query results; the techniques leverage a common industry practice of providing what we call surrogates: alternate, less sensitive versions of nodes and edges releasable to a broader community. We describe techniques for interposing surrogate nodes and edges to protect sensitive graph components, while maximizing graph connectivity and giving users as much information as possible. In this work, we formalize the problem of creating a protected account G' of a graph G. We provide a utility measure to compare the informativeness of alternate protected accounts and an opacity measure for protected accounts, which indicates the likelihood that an attacker can recreat...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Barbara T. Blaustein, Adriane Chapman, Len Seligman, M. David Allen, Arnon Rosenthal
• Keywords: CORR 2011, Education, Protected Accounts, Sensitive Graph, Sensitive Graph Components