Friend in the Middle (FiM): Tackling de-anonymization in social networks

Abstract

With the large growth of Online Social Networks (OSNs), several privacy threats have been highlighted, as well as solutions to mitigate them. Most solutions focus on restricting the visibility of users information. However, OSNs also represent a threat for contextual information, such as the OSN structure and how users communicate among each other. Recently proposed deanonymization techniques proved to be effective in re-identifying users in anonymized social network. In this paper, we present Friend in the Middle (FiM): a novel approach to make OSNs more resilient against de-anonymization techniques. Additionally we evaluate and demonstrate throughout experimental results the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal.