Collective Data-Sanitization for Preventing Sensitive Information Inference Attacks in Social Networks

Abstract—Releasing social network data could seriously breach user privacy. User profile and friendship relations are inherently private. Unfortunately, it is possible to predict sensitive information carried in released data latently by utilizing 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. The key novel idea lies that besides sanitizing friendship relations, the proposed method can take advantages of various data-manipulating methods. We show that we can easily reduce adversary’s prediction accuracy on sensitive information, while resulting in less accuracy decrease on non-sensitive information towards three social network datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that employs collective methods involving various data-manipulating methods and social relationships to protect against inference attacks in social networks.

CONCLUSIONS

We address two issues in this paper: (a) how exactly third party users launch an inference attack to predict sensitive information of users, and (b) are there effective strategies to protect against such an attack to achieve a desired privacyutility tradeoff. For the first issue, we show that collectively utilizing both attribute and link information can significantly increase prediction accuracy for sensitive information. For the second issue, we explore the dependence relationships for Any Query Call Us: 9566355386

 

utility/public attributes, and privacy/public attributes. Based on these results, we propose a Collective Method that take advantages of various data manipulating methods to guarantee sanitizing user data does not incur a bad impact on data utility. Using Collective Method, we are able to effectively sanitize social network data prior to release. The solutions for the two addressed issues are proven to be effective towards three real social datasets.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:

• System : Pentium IV 2.4 GHz.

• Hard Disk : 40 GB.

• Floppy Drive : 1.44 Mb.

• Monitor : 15 VGA Colour.

• Mouse : Logitech.

• Ram : 512 Mb.

 

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

• Operating system : - Windows XP/7.

• Coding Language : JAVA/J2EE

• Data Base : MYSQL

 

REFERENCES

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/.

[2] http://www.imdb.com/.

[3] “Facebook beacon,” 2007.