Network identification and authentication

Research on networks is commonly performed using anonymized network data for various reasons such as protecting data privacy. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to verify the source of network data, which leads to questions such as: Given an anonymized graph, can we identify the network from which it is collected? Or if one claims the graph is sampled from a certain network, can we verify it? The intuitive approach is to check for subgraph isomorphism. However, subgraph isomorphism is NP-complete; hence, infeasible for most large networks. Inspired by biometrics studies, we address these challenges by formulating two new problems: network identification and network authentication. To tackle these problems, similar to research on human fingerprints, we introduce two versions of a network identity: (1) embedding-based identity and (2) distribution-based identity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these network identities on various real-world networks. Using these identities, we propose two approaches for network identification. One method uses supervised learning and can achieve an identification accuracy rate of 94.7%, and the other, which is easier to implement, relies on distances between identities and achieves an accuracy rate of 85.5%. For network authentication, we propose two methods to build a network authentication system. The first is a supervised learner and provides a low false accept rate and the other method allows one to control the false reject rate with a reasonable false accept rate across networks. Our study can help identify or verify the source of network data, validate network-based research, and be used for network-based biometrics.