Ambiguity in Social Network Data for Presence, Sensitive-Attribute, Degree and Relationship Privacy Protection

Maintaining privacy in network data publishing is a major challenge. This is because known characteristics of individuals can be used to extract new information about them. Recently, researchers have developed privacy methods based on k-anonymity and l-diversity to prevent re-identification or sensitive label disclosure through certain structural information. However, most of these studies have considered only structural information and have been developed for undirected networks. Furthermore, most existing approaches rely on generalization and node clustering so may entail significant information loss as all properties of all members of each group are generalized to the same value. In this paper, we introduce a framework for protecting sensitive attribute, degree (the number of connected entities), and relationships, as well as the presence of individuals in directed social network data whose nodes contain attributes. First, we define a privacy model that specifies privacy requirements for the above private information. Then, we introduce the technique of Ambiguity in Social Network data (ASN) based on anatomy, which specifies how to publish social network data. To employ ASN, individuals are partitioned into groups. Then, ASN publishes exact values of properties of individuals of each group with common group ID in several tables. The lossy join of those tables based on group ID injects uncertainty to reconstruct the original network. We also show how to measure different privacy requirements in ASN. Simulation results on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our framework, which protects from four types of private information disclosure, preserves data utility in tabular, topological and spectrum aspects of networks at a satisfactory level.