International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 01 May 2016

Varsha Bhat Kukkala, Jaspal Singh Saini, S.R.S. Iyengar
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Social network analysis as a technique has been applied to diverse set of fields, including, organizational behaviour, sociology, economics and biology. However, for sensitive networks such as hate networks, trust networks and sexual networks, these techniques have been sparsely used. This is majorly attributed to the unavailability of network data. Anonymization is the most commonly used technique for performing privacy preserving network analysis. The process involves the presence of a trusted third party, who is aware of the complete network, and releases a sanitized version of it. In this paper, we propose an alternative, in which, the desired analysis can be performed by the parties who distributedly hold the network, such that : (a) no central third party is required; (b) the topology of the underlying network is kept hidden. We design multiparty protocols for securely performing various social network analysis methods. The network parameters addressed in this paper include degree distribution, clustering coefficient, closeness centrality, pagerank algorithm and K-shell decomposition algorithm. The designed protocols are secure in the malicious adversarial model with less than one third corrupt parties.
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