Attacks and Countermeasures in Social Network Data Publishing

[Abstract] With the increasing prevalence of social networks, more and more social network data are published for many applications, such as social network analysis and data mining. However, this brings privacy problems. For example, adversaries can get sensitive information of some individuals easily with little background knowledge. How to publish social network data for analysis purpose while preserving the privacy of individuals has raised many concerns. Many algorithms have been proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we discuss this privacy problem from two aspects: attack models and countermeasures. We analyse privacy concerns, model the background knowledge that adversary may utilize and review the recently developed attack models. We then survey the state⁃of⁃the⁃art privacy preserving methods in two categories: anonymization methods and differential privacy methods. We also provide research directions in this area.

[Keywords] social network; data publishing; attack model; privacy preserving