Nowadays, many computer systems generate structured data (also called graph data). Graph data spans many different domains, ranging from online social network data from networks like Facebook to epidemiological data used to study the spread of infectious diseases. Graph data is shared regularly for many purposes including academic research and for business collaborations. Since graph data may be sensitive, data owners often use various anonymization techniques that often compromise the resulting utility of the anonymized data. To make matters worse, there are several state-of-the-art graph data de-anonymization attacks that have proven successful in recent years. To date, graph data owners cannot gauge the practical or theoretical vulnerability of their data, nor can they comprehensively gauge its utility after anonymization.

In this talk, we first introduce various novel structure-based de-anonymization attacks on graph data. Subsequently, we study the theoretical foundation for the success of existing de-anonymization attacks along with large-scale evaluations on real-world graph data. Third, we propose, design, and implement SecGraph, a uniform and open-source Secure Graph data sharing/publishing system. Finally, we will discuss some future research directions.

Shouling Ji is a Research Faculty in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology (2015), a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia State University (2013), and B.S. (with Honors) and M.S. degrees both in Computer Science from Heilongjiang University. His current research interests include Big Data Security and Privacy, Differential Privacy, Password Security, and Data Analytics. He also has interests in Graph Theory and Algorithms, and Wireless Networks. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, and IEEE COMSOC and was the Membership Chair of the IEEE Student Branch at Georgia State University (2012-2013). He was a Research Intern at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Shouling is the recipient of the 2012 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad.