EPFL
Tuesday, July 30th at 11am CSB 453 (Mudd 4th floor)
Abstract:
The proliferation of online social networks, and the concomitant
accumulation of user data, give rise to hotly debated issues of
privacy, security, and control. One specific challenge is the sharing
or public release of anonymized information without accidentally
leaking personally identifiable information (PII). Unfortunately, it
is often difficult to ascertain that sophisticated statistical
techniques, potentially employing additional external data sources,
could not break anonymity.
We consider an instance of this problem, where the object of interest
is the structure of a social network, i.e., a graph describing users
and their links. One may naively assume that anonymizing the users’
identities would preclude an attacker from obtaining any PII from such
a graph. However, recent work on network de-anonymization has
demonstrated that this is not necessarily the case: the availability
of node and link data from another domain, which is correlated with
the anonymized network, has been used to re-identify the anonymized
nodes. In this talk, we discuss statistical models based on random
graphs for the de-anonymization problem, and derive conditions for
network privacy, and insights about vulnerabilities. This has
important implications for policies for sharing of anonymized network
information.
Speaker Biography:
Matthias Grossglauser is an Associate Professor in the School
of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. He received his Diplôme
d'Ingénieur en Systèmes de Communication degree from EPFL in 1994, the
M.Sc. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1994, and the
Ph.D. from the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6) in 1998. His
research interests are in social and information networks, graph mining,
privacy, mobile and wireless networking, and network traffic measurement
and modeling. He received the 1998 Cor Baayen Award from theEuropean
Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), the IEEE INFOCOM
2001 Best Paper Award, and the 2006 CoNEXT/SIGCOMM Rising Star Award. He served
on the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and on numerou
Technical Program Committees.
From 2007-2010, he was with the Nokia Research Center (NRC) in Helsinki, Finland,
holding the positions of Laboratory Director, then of Head of a tech-transfer
program focused on data mining, analytics, and machine learning. In addition, he
served on Nokia's CEO Technology Council, a technology advisory group reporting to
the CEO. From 2003-2007, he was an Assistant Professor at EPFL. From 1998 to 2002,
he was a Senior, then Principal Member of Research Staff in the Networking and
Distributed Systems Laboratory at AT&T Research in New Jersey. From 1995 to 1998,
he was a Ph.D. student at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France.