SpyvsSpyAnonymous Broadcasting over Networks.pdf

POSTER: Spy vs. Spy: Anonymous Broadcasting over Networks

PRESENTER: Giulia Fanti, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ABSTRACT: 
Anonymous microblogging platforms, such as Whisper, Yik Yak, and Secret have emerged as important tools for sharing one's thoughts without fear of judgment by friends, the public, or authorities. These platforms provide anonymity by allowing users to share content (e.g., short messages) with their peers without revealing authorship information to other users. However, recent advances in rumor source detection show that existing messaging protocols, including those used in the mentioned anonymous microblogging applications, leak authorship information when the adversary has global access to metadata. For example, if an adversary can see which users of a messaging service received a particular message, or the timestamps at which a subset of users received a given message, the adversary can infer the message author's identity with high probability. We introduce a novel anonymous messaging protocol, which we call adaptive diffusion, that is designed to resist such adversaries. We show that adaptive diffusion spreads messages quickly while achieving provably-optimal anonymity guarantees for specific classes of connectivity networks. Simulations on real social network data show that adaptive diffusion effectively hides the location of the source on real-world networks.

CO-PRESENTER(S): 
Peter Kairouz, Sewoong Oh, Kannan Ramchandran, Pramod Viswanath

KEYWORDS: 
Anonymity, anonymous social media, inference on graphs

PRESENTER BIO:
Giulia Fanti is a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying privacy-preserving technologies under Professor Pramod Viswanath. She will join Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Fall 2017. She previously obtained her Ph.D. and M.S. in EECS from U.C. Berkeley under Professor Kannan Ramchandran, and her B.S. in ECE from Olin College of Engineering in 2010. She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, as well as a Best Paper Award at ACM Sigmetrics 2015 for her work on anonymous rumor spreading.