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Disclosing user relationships in email networks

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Abstract

To reveal patterns of communications of users in a network, an attacker may repeatedly obtain partial information on behavior and finally derive relationships between pairs of users through the modeling of this statistical information. This work is an enhancement of a previously presented statistical disclosure attack. The improvement of the attack is based on the use of the EM algorithm to improve the estimation of messages sent by users and to derive what pairs of users really communicate. Two methods are presented using the EM algorithm and the best method is used over real email data over 32 different network domains. Results are encouraging with high classification and positive predictive value rates.

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Acknowledgments

Part of the computations of this work was performed in EOLO, the HPC of Climate Change of the International Campus of Excellence of Moncloa, funded by MECD and MICINN. This work was supported by the “Programa de Financiación de Grupos de Investigación UCM validados de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid - Banco Santander”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Group of Analysis, Security and Systems (GASS), Department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence (DISIA), Faculty of Information Technology and Computer Science, Office 431, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Calle Profesor José García Santesmases, 9, Ciudad Universitaria, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Javier Portela, Luis Javier García Villalba, Alejandra Guadalupe Silva Trujillo & Ana Lucila Sandoval Orozco

  2. School of Information and Computing Science, University of Tasmania, Centenary Building, Room 350, Private Bag 87, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia

    Tai-Hoon Kim

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  1. Javier Portela
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  2. Luis Javier García Villalba
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  3. Alejandra Guadalupe Silva Trujillo
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  4. Ana Lucila Sandoval Orozco
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  5. Tai-Hoon Kim
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Correspondence to Tai-Hoon Kim.

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Portela, J., García Villalba, L.J., Silva Trujillo, A.G. et al. Disclosing user relationships in email networks. J Supercomput 72, 3787–3800 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-015-1524-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-015-1524-7

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