学术报告：Stalking Online: on User Privacy in Social Networks

题目：Stalking Online: on User Privacy in Social Networks 

报告人：Bo Luo 

时间：2012.06.14（星期四）上午10:30-11:30 

报告内容摘要： 

With the extreme popularity of Web and online social networks, a large amount of personal information has been made available over the Internet. On the other hand, advances in information retrieval, data mining and knowledge discovery technologies have enabled users to efficiently satisfy their information needs over the Internet or from large-scale data sets. However, such technologies also help the adversaries such as web stalkers to discover private information about their victims from mass data. 

In this talk, I will briefly cover two research projects on user privacy in social networks at the InfoSec group of the University of Kansas. The goal is to answer two questions: “how identifiable we are?” and “who is more likely to (accidentally) disclose our information?” 

We first study privacy-sensitive information that is accessible from the Web, and how these information could be utilized to discover personal identities. In the proposed scenario, an adversary is assumed to possess a small piece of “seed” information about a targeted user, and conduct extensive and intelligent search to identify the target. I will introduce two types of attackers, namely tireless attackers and resourceful attackers, and then analyze detailed attacking mechanisms that could be performed by these attackers, and quantify the threats of both types of attacks to general Web users. Next, I will discuss how information flows among users in social networks, and how we can utilize such knowledge to help protect private information. In particular, we introduce a content-based user behavior model, which predicts how users would react to their friends’ posts. 

报告人简介： 

Bo Luo got his Ph.D. in information sciences and technology from the Pennsylvania State University in 2008, and joined the faculty of department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Kansas. Prior to that, he got an M.Phil degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a B.E. degree from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He was an intern at IBM Silicon Valley Lab during the summer of 2006 and 2007. He is currently a member of the Information Assurance Lab at ITTC, with research interests on information security and privacy in distributed information systems, social networks and Web, smart grids, etc. His homepage could be found at: http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~bluo/