Towards link inference attack against network structure perturbation

Blockchain-based privacy and security model for transactional data in large private networks

Cyberphysical systems connect physical devices and large private network environments in modern communication systems. A fundamental worry in the establishment of large private networks is mitigating the danger of transactional data privacy breaches caused by adversaries using a variety of exploitation techniques. This study presents a privacy-preserving architecture for ensuring the privacy and security of transaction data in large private networks. The proposed model employs digital certificates, RSA-based public key infrastructure, and the blockchain to address user transactional data privacy concerns. The model also guarantees that data in transit remains secure and unaltered and that its provenance remains authentic and secure during node-to-node interactions within a large private network. The proposed model has increased the encryption speed by about 17 times, while the decryption process is expedited by 4 times. Therefore, the average overall acceleration obtained was 16.5. Both the findings of the security analysis and the performance analysis demonstrate that the proposed model can safeguard transactional data during communications on large private networks more effectively and securely than the existing solutions.

Fairness-Aware Predictive Graph Learning in Social Networks

Predictive graph learning approaches have been bringing significant advantages in many real-life applications, such as social networks, recommender systems, and other social-related downstream tasks. For those applications, learning models should be able to produce a great prediction result to maximize the usability of their application. However, the paradigm of current graph learning methods generally neglects the differences in link strength, leading to discriminative predictive results, resulting in different performance between tasks. Based on that problem, a fairness-aware predictive learning model is needed to balance the link strength differences and not only consider how to formulate it. To address this problem, we first formally define two biases (i.e., Preference and Favoritism) that widely exist in previous representation learning models. Then, we employ modularity maximization to distinguish strong and weak links from the quantitative perspective. Eventually, we propose a novel predictive learning framework entitled ACE that first implements the link strength differentiated learning process and then integrates it with a dual propagation process. The effectiveness and fairness of our proposed ACE have been verified on four real-world social networks. Compared to nine different state-of-the-art methods, ACE and its variants show better performance. The ACE framework can better reconstruct networks, thus also providing a high possibility of resolving misinformation in graph-structured data.

Progresses and challenges in link prediction

Link prediction is a paradigmatic problem in network science, which aims at estimating the existence likelihoods of nonobserved links, based on known topology. After a brief introduction of the standard problem and evaluation metrics of link prediction, this review will summarize representative progresses about local similarity indices, link predictability, network embedding, matrix completion, ensemble learning, and some others, mainly extracted from related publications in the last decade. Finally, this review will outline some long-standing challenges for future studies.

k-NDDP: An Efficient Anonymization Model for Social Network Data Release

With the evolution of Internet technology, social networking sites have gained a lot of popularity. People make new friends, share their interests, experiences in life, etc. With these activities on social sites, people generate a vast amount of data that is analyzed by third parties for various purposes. As such, publishing social data without protecting an individual’s private or confidential information can be dangerous. To provide privacy protection, this paper proposes a new degree anonymization approach k-NDDP, which extends the concept of k-anonymity and differential privacy based on Node DP for vertex degrees. In particular, this paper considers identity disclosures on social data. If the adversary efficiently obtains background knowledge about the victim’s degree and neighbor connections, it can re-identify its victim from the social data even if the user’s identity is removed. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, a simple and, at the same time, effective method k–NDDP is proposed. The method is the extension of k-NMF, i.e., the state-of-the-art method to protect against mutual friend attack, to defend against identity disclosures by adding noise to the social data. Second, the achieved privacy using the concept of differential privacy is evaluated. An extensive empirical study shows that for different values of k, the divergence produced by k-NDDP for CC, BW and APL is not more than 0.8%, also added dummy links are 60% less, as compared to k-NMF approach, thereby it validates that the proposed k-NDDP approach provides strong privacy while maintaining the usefulness of data.