De-Anonymization of Networks with Communities: When Quantifications Meet Algorithms

A crucial privacy-driven issue nowadays is re- identifying ano-nymized social networks by mapping them to correlated cross-domain auxiliary networks. Prior works are typically based on modeling social networks as random graphs representing users and their relations, and subsequently quantify the quality of mappings through cost functions that are proposed without sufficient rationale. Also, it remains unknown how to algorithmically meet the demand of such quantifications, i.e., to find the minimizer of the cost functions. We address those concerns in a more realistic social network modeling parameterized by community structures that can be leveraged as side information for de- anonymization. By Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation, our first contribution is new and well justified cost functions, which, when minimized, enjoy superiority to previous ones in finding the correct mapping with the highest probability. The feasibility of the cost functions is then for the first time algorithmically characterized. While proving the general multiplicative inapproximability, we are able to propose two heuristics, which, respectively, enjoy an ε-additive approximation and a conditional optimality in carrying out successful user re- identification. Our theoretical findings are empirically validated,with a notable dataset extracted from rare true cross-domain networks that reproduce genuine social network de-anonymization.