Anonymizing Graphs

Abstract: Motivated by recently discovered privacy attacks on social networks, we study the problem of anonymizing the underlying graph of interactions in a social network. We call a graph (k,l)-anonymous if for every node in the graph there exist at least k other nodes that share at least l of its neighbors. We consider two combinatorial problems arising from this notion of anonymity in graphs. More specifically, given an input graph we ask for the minimum number of edges to be added so that the graph becomes (k,l)-anonymous. We define two variants of this minimization problem and study their properties. We show that for certain values of k and l the problems are polynomial-time solvable, while for others they become NP-hard. Approximation algorithms for the latter cases are also given.