Analyzing and Securing Social Networks

Securing social networks and ensuring the privacy of participants has become a crucial need. There are no books to date that address both social network analytics as well as security and privacy. Filling this need, this book discusses concepts, techniques, and tools for analyzing and securing social networks. It covers experimental systems for location mining, sentiment mining, and threat prediction, as well as experimental investigation of privacy in social networks and access control models for social networks.

Analyzing and Securing Social Networks focuses on the two major technologies that have been developed for online social networks (OSNs): (i) data mining technologies for analyzing these networks and extracting useful information such as location, demographics, and sentiments of the participants of the network, and (ii) security and privacy technologies that ensure the privacy of the participants of the network as well as provide controlled access to the information posted and exchanged by the participants.

The authors explore security and privacy issues for social media systems, analyze such systems, and discuss prototypes they have developed for social media systems whose data are represented using semantic web technologies. These experimental systems have been developed at The University of Texas at Dallas. The material in this book, together with the numerous references listed in each chapter, have been used for a graduate-level course at The University of Texas at Dallas on analyzing and securing social media. Several experimental systems developed by graduate students are also provided.

The book is divided into nine main sections: (1) supporting technologies, (2) basics of analyzing and securing social networks, (3) the authors’ design and implementation of various social network analytics tools, (4) privacy aspects of social networks, (5) access control and inference control for social networks, (6) experimental systems designed or developed by the authors on analyzing and securing social networks, (7) social media application systems developed by the authors, (8) secure social media systems developed by the authors, and (9) some of the authors’ exploratory work and further directions.