Optimal Active Social Network De-anonymization Using Information Thresholds

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Farhad Shirani, Siddharth Garg and Elza Erkip.
In this paper, de-anonymizing internet users by actively querying their group memberships in social networks is considered. In this problem, an anonymous victim visits the attacker’s website, and the attacker uses the victim’s browser history to query her social media activity for the purpose of de-anonymization using the minimum number of queries. A stochastic model of the problem is considered where the attacker has partial prior knowledge of the group membership graph and receives noisy responses to its real-time queries.