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246
SybilLimit: A nearoptimal social network defense against sybil attacks
- 2008 [Online]. Available: http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~yuhf/sybillimit-tr.pdf
"... Abstract—Open-access distributed systems such as peer-to-peer systems are particularly vulnerable to sybil attacks, where a malicious user creates multiple fake identities (called sybil nodes). Without a trusted central authority that can tie identities to real human beings, defending against sybil ..."
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Cited by 216 (7 self)
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Abstract—Open-access distributed systems such as peer-to-peer systems are particularly vulnerable to sybil attacks, where a malicious user creates multiple fake identities (called sybil nodes). Without a trusted central authority that can tie identities to real human beings, defending against sybil attacks is quite challenging. Among the small number of decentralized approaches, our recent SybilGuard protocol leverages a key insight on social networks to bound the number of sybil nodes accepted. Despite its promising direction, SybilGuard can allow a large number of sybil nodes to be accepted. Furthermore, SybilGuard assumes that social networks are fast-mixing, which has never been confirmed in the real world. This paper presents the novel SybilLimit protocol that leverages the same insight as SybilGuard, but offers dramatically improved and near-optimal guarantees. The number of sybil nodes accepted is reduced by a factor of 2 ( p n), or around 200 times in our experiments for a million-node system. We further prove that SybilLimit’s guarantee is at most a log n factor away from optimal when considering approaches based on fast-mixing social networks. Finally, based on three large-scale real-world social networks, we provide the first evidence that real-world social networks are indeed fast-mixing. This validates the fundamental assumption behind SybilLimit’s and SybilGuard’s approach. Index Terms—Social networks, sybil attack, sybil identities, SybilGuard, SybilLimit. I.
Community structure in large networks: Natural cluster sizes and the absence of large well-defined clusters
, 2008
"... A large body of work has been devoted to defining and identifying clusters or communities in social and information networks, i.e., in graphs in which the nodes represent underlying social entities and the edges represent some sort of interaction between pairs of nodes. Most such research begins wit ..."
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Cited by 208 (17 self)
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A large body of work has been devoted to defining and identifying clusters or communities in social and information networks, i.e., in graphs in which the nodes represent underlying social entities and the edges represent some sort of interaction between pairs of nodes. Most such research begins with the premise that a community or a cluster should be thought of as a set of nodes that has more and/or better connections between its members than to the remainder of the network. In this paper, we explore from a novel perspective several questions related to identifying meaningful communities in large social and information networks, and we come to several striking conclusions. Rather than defining a procedure to extract sets of nodes from a graph and then attempt to interpret these sets as a “real ” communities, we employ approximation algorithms for the graph partitioning problem to characterize as a function of size the statistical and structural properties of partitions of graphs that could plausibly be interpreted as communities. In particular, we define the network community profile plot, which characterizes the “best ” possible community—according to the conductance measure—over a wide range of size scales. We study over 100 large real-world networks, ranging from traditional and on-line social networks, to technological and information networks and
Kronecker Graphs: An Approach to Modeling Networks
- JOURNAL OF MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH 11 (2010) 985-1042
, 2010
"... How can we generate realistic networks? In addition, how can we do so with a mathematically tractable model that allows for rigorous analysis of network properties? Real networks exhibit a long list of surprising properties: Heavy tails for the in- and out-degree distribution, heavy tails for the ei ..."
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Cited by 123 (3 self)
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How can we generate realistic networks? In addition, how can we do so with a mathematically tractable model that allows for rigorous analysis of network properties? Real networks exhibit a long list of surprising properties: Heavy tails for the in- and out-degree distribution, heavy tails for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors, small diameters, and densification and shrinking diameters over time. Current network models and generators either fail to match several of the above properties, are complicated to analyze mathematically, or both. Here we propose a generative model for networks that is both mathematically tractable and can generate networks that have all the above mentioned structural properties. Our main idea here is to use a non-standard matrix operation, the Kronecker product, to generate graphs which we refer to as “Kronecker graphs”. First, we show that Kronecker graphs naturally obey common network properties. In fact, we rigorously prove that they do so. We also provide empirical evidence showing that Kronecker graphs can effectively model the structure of real networks. We then present KRONFIT, a fast and scalable algorithm for fitting the Kronecker graph generation model to large real networks. A naive approach to fitting would take super-exponential
Inferring Networks of Diffusion and Influence
, 2010
"... Information diffusion and virus propagation are fundamental processes talking place in networks. While it is often possible to directly observe when nodes become infected, observing individual transmissions (i.e., who infects whom or who influences whom) is typically very difficult. Furthermore, in ..."
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Cited by 116 (13 self)
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Information diffusion and virus propagation are fundamental processes talking place in networks. While it is often possible to directly observe when nodes become infected, observing individual transmissions (i.e., who infects whom or who influences whom) is typically very difficult. Furthermore, in many applications, the underlying network over which the diffusions and propagations spread is actually unobserved. We tackle these challenges by developing a method for tracing paths of diffusion and influence through networks and inferring the networks over which contagions propagate. Given the times when nodes adopt pieces of information or become infected, we identify the optimal network that best explains the observed infection times. Since the optimization problem is NP-hard to solve exactly, we develop an efficient approximation algorithm that scales to large datasets and in practice gives provably near-optimal performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by tracing information cascades in a set of 170 million blogs and news articles over a one year period to infer how information flows through the online media space. We find that the diffusion network of news tends to have a core-periphery structure with a small set of core media sites that diffuse information to the rest of the Web. These sites tend to have stable circles of influence with more general news media sites acting as connectors between them.
GraphChi: Large-scale Graph Computation On just a PC
- In Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI’12
, 2012
"... Current systems for graph computation require a distributed computing cluster to handle very large real-world problems, such as analysis on social networks or the web graph. While distributed computational resources have become more accessible, developing distributed graph algorithms still remains c ..."
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Cited by 115 (6 self)
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Current systems for graph computation require a distributed computing cluster to handle very large real-world problems, such as analysis on social networks or the web graph. While distributed computational resources have become more accessible, developing distributed graph algorithms still remains challenging, especially to non-experts. In this work, we present GraphChi, a disk-based system for computing efficiently on graphs with billions of edges. By using a well-known method to break large graphs into small parts, and a novel parallel sliding windows method, GraphChi is able to execute several advanced data mining, graph mining, and machine learning algorithms on very large graphs, using just a single consumer-level computer. We further extend GraphChi to support graphs that evolve over time, and demonstrate that, on a single computer, GraphChi can process over one hundred thousand graph updates per second, while simultaneously performing computation. We show, through experiments and theoretical analysis, that GraphChi performs well on both SSDs and rotational hard drives. By repeating experiments reported for existing distributed systems, we show that, with only fraction of the resources, GraphChi can solve the same problems in very reasonable time. Our work makes large-scale graph computation available to anyone with a modern PC. 1
SPECTRAL CLUSTERING AND THE HIGH-DIMENSIONAL STOCHASTIC BLOCKMODEL
- SUBMITTED TO THE ANNALS OF STATISTICS
"... Networks or graphs can easily represent a diverse set of data sources that are characterized by interacting units or actors. Social networks, representing people who communicate with each other, are one example. Communities or clusters of highly connected actors form an essential feature in the stru ..."
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Cited by 105 (7 self)
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Networks or graphs can easily represent a diverse set of data sources that are characterized by interacting units or actors. Social networks, representing people who communicate with each other, are one example. Communities or clusters of highly connected actors form an essential feature in the structure of several empirical networks. Spectral clustering is a popular and computationally feasible method to discover these communities. The Stochastic Blockmodel (Holland, Laskey and Leinhardt, 1983) is a social network model with well defined communities; each node is a member of one community. For a network generated from the Stochastic Blockmodel, we bound the number of nodes “misclustered” by spectral clustering. The asymptotic results in this paper are the first clustering results that allow the number of clusters in the model to grow with the number of nodes, hence the name highdimensional. In order to study spectral clustering under the Stochastic Blockmodel, we first show that under the more general latent space model, the eigenvectors of the normalized graph Laplacian asymptotically converge to the eigenvectors of a “population” normalized graph Laplacian. Aside from the implication for spectral clustering, this provides insight into a graph visualization technique. Our method of studying the eigenvectors of random matrices is original.
An event-based framework for characterizing the evolution of interaction graphs
, 2007
"... Interaction graphs are ubiquitous in many fields such as bioinformatics, sociology and physical sciences. There have been many studies in the literature targeted at studying and mining these graphs. However, almost all of them have studied these graphs from a static point of view. The study of the e ..."
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Cited by 95 (3 self)
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Interaction graphs are ubiquitous in many fields such as bioinformatics, sociology and physical sciences. There have been many studies in the literature targeted at studying and mining these graphs. However, almost all of them have studied these graphs from a static point of view. The study of the evolution of these graphs over time can provide tremendous insight on the behavior of entities, communities and the flow of information among them. In this work, we present an event-based characterization of critical behavioral patterns for temporally varying interaction graphs. We use non-overlapping snapshots of interaction graphs and develop a framework for capturing and identifying interesting events from them. We use these events to characterize complex behavioral patterns of individuals and communities over time. We show how semantic information can be incorporated to reason about community-behavior events. We also demonstrate the application of behavioral patterns for the purposes of modeling evolution, link prediction and influence maximization. Finally, we present a diffusion model for evolving networks, based on our framework.
Sybil-resilient online content voting
- In Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI
, 2009
"... Obtaining user opinion (using votes) is essential to ranking user-generated online content. However, any content voting system is susceptible to the Sybil attack where adversaries can out-vote real users by creating many Sybil identities. In this paper, we present SumUp, a Sybilresilient vote aggreg ..."
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Cited by 71 (5 self)
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Obtaining user opinion (using votes) is essential to ranking user-generated online content. However, any content voting system is susceptible to the Sybil attack where adversaries can out-vote real users by creating many Sybil identities. In this paper, we present SumUp, a Sybilresilient vote aggregation system that leverages the trust network among users to defend against Sybil attacks. SumUp uses the technique of adaptive vote flow aggregation to limit the number of bogus votes cast by adversaries to no more than the number of attack edges in the trust network (with high probability). Using user feedback on votes, SumUp further restricts the voting power of adversaries who continuously misbehave to below the number of their attack edges. Using detailed evaluation of several existing social networks (YouTube, Flickr), we show SumUp’s ability to handle Sybil attacks. By applying SumUp on the voting trace of Digg, a popular news voting site, we have found strong evidence of attack on many articles marked “popular ” by Digg. 1
Estimating and sampling graphs with multidimensional random walks
, 2010
"... Estimating characteristics of large graphs via sampling is a vital part of the study of complex networks. Current sampling methods such as (independent) random vertex and random walks are useful but have drawbacks. Random vertex sampling may require too many resources (time, bandwidth, or money). Ra ..."
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Cited by 68 (12 self)
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Estimating characteristics of large graphs via sampling is a vital part of the study of complex networks. Current sampling methods such as (independent) random vertex and random walks are useful but have drawbacks. Random vertex sampling may require too many resources (time, bandwidth, or money). Random walks, which normally require fewer resources per sample, can suffer from large estimation errors in the presence of disconnected or loosely connected graphs. In this work we propose a new m-dimensional random walk that uses m dependent random walkers. We show that the proposed sampling method, which we call Frontier sampling, exhibits all of the nice sampling properties of a regular random walk. At the same time, our simulations over large real world graphs show that, in the presence of disconnected or loosely connected components, Frontier sampling exhibits lower estimation errors than regular random walks. We also show that Frontier sampling is more suitable than random vertex sampling to sample the tail of the degree distribution of the graph.
Uncovering the temporal dynamics of diffusion networks
- in Proc. of the 28th Int. Conf. on Machine Learning (ICML’11
, 2011
"... Time plays an essential role in the diffusion of information, influence and disease over networks. In many cases we only observe when a node copies information, makes a decision or becomes infected – but the connectivity, transmission rates between nodes and transmission sources are unknown. Inferri ..."
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Cited by 56 (11 self)
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Time plays an essential role in the diffusion of information, influence and disease over networks. In many cases we only observe when a node copies information, makes a decision or becomes infected – but the connectivity, transmission rates between nodes and transmission sources are unknown. Inferring the underlying dynamics is of outstanding interest since it enables forecasting, influencing and retarding infections, broadly construed. To this end, we model diffusion processes as discrete networks of continuous temporal processes occurring at different rates. Given cascade data – observed infection times of nodes – we infer the edges of the global diffusion network and estimate the transmission rates of each edge that best explain the observed data. The optimization problem is convex. The model naturally (without heuristics) imposes sparse solutions and requires no parameter tuning. The problem decouples into a collection of independent smaller problems, thus scaling easily to networks on the order of hundreds of thousands of nodes. Experiments on real and synthetic data show that our algorithm both recovers the edges of diffusion networks and accurately estimates their transmission rates from cascade data. 1.
