Visible to the public Targeted Poisoning Attacks on Social Recommender Systems

TitleTargeted Poisoning Attacks on Social Recommender Systems
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2019
AuthorsHu, Rui, Guo, Yuanxiong, Pan, Miao, Gong, Yanmin
Conference Name2019 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)
Keywordscomputer security, human factors, Information systems, Motion pictures, Optimization, pubcrawl, recommender systems, Resiliency, Scalability, Social network services, Sparse matrices
AbstractWith the popularity of online social networks, social recommendations that rely on oneaEU(tm)s social connections to make personalized recommendations have become possible. This introduces vulnerabilities for an adversarial party to compromise the recommendations for users by utilizing their social connections. In this paper, we propose the targeted poisoning attack on the factorization-based social recommender system in which the attacker aims to promote an item to a group of target users by injecting fake ratings and social connections. We formulate the optimal poisoning attack as a bi-level program and develop an efficient algorithm to find the optimal attacking strategy. We then evaluate the proposed attacking strategy on real-world dataset and demonstrate that the social recommender system is sensitive to the targeted poisoning attack. We find that users in the social recommender system can be attacked even if they do not have direct social connections with the attacker.
DOI10.1109/GLOBECOM38437.2019.9013539
Citation Keyhu_targeted_2019