Identity obfuscation in graphs through the information theoretic lens

Analyzing the structure of social networks is of interest in a wide range of disciplines, but such activity is limited by the fact that these data represent sensitive information and can not be published in their raw form. One of the approaches to sanitize network data is to randomly add or remove edges from the graph. Recent studies have quantified the level of anonymity that is obtained by random perturbation by means of a-posteriori belief probabilities and, by conducting experiments on small datasets, arrived at the conclusion that random perturbation can not achieve meaningful levels of anonymity without deteriorating the graph features.