Amphi F107 - INRIA - Montbonnot
9 September 2011 - 10h30
Privacy issues in Measuring and Analyzing Massive Network Graphs
by Alessandra Sala from UCSB University of California, Santa Barbara
9 September 2011 - 10h30
Privacy issues in Measuring and Analyzing Massive Network Graphs
by Alessandra Sala from UCSB University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract: Modern communication networks such as online social networks give us a
unique opportunity of observing, analyzing and better understanding
large scale network structures. Networks data from these measurements
often capture potentially private or confidential data. These privacy
concerns are especially significant when researchers try to share
these real network traces for research.
Researchers need realistic graphs to perform realistic benchmark
analysis of novel protocols and applications. Measurement-calibrated
graph models is an attractive alternative to sharing real datasets. We
investigated several graph models to generate synthetic graphs, and leveraged
online social networks traces to validate whether the resulting synthetic
graphs are statistically similar to real graphs. However, it is unclear whether
extremely realistic synthetic data can leak information from the
original dataset. In addition, the privacy of synthetic graphs is
difficult to quantify, because we lack a practical and accurate metric able to
quantify the resilience of a graph against privacy attacks. We propose a novel
graph generation process, Pygmalion, which is able to bridge the natural
tension between accuracy and privacy of synthetic graphs. Pygmalion
integrates a statistical framework, called $epsilon$-Differential
Privacy, into a graph generative model, and provides a cohesive
solution to share accurate synthetic graphs with strong and provable
privacy guarantees.
Short Bio:
Alessandra Sala is a research associate in the Department of
Computer Science at University of California Santa Barbara. She has received
funding from the Cisco University Research program for her project on
“Understanding and Modeling the Structure of Online Social Networks.”
In her prior appointment, she worked for two years as post-doctoral
fellow with the CurrentLab research group led by Prof. Ben Y. Zhao, and
still collaborates with them closely. She received her Ph.D. in Computer
Science from Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy in May 2008.
This event is organised by the Seminar - Privacy.
