• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.1272-1290
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• 2013

Privacy-preserving collaborative filtering schemes are becoming increasingly popular because they handle the information overload problem without jeopardizing privacy. However, they may be susceptible to shilling or profile injection attacks, similar to traditional recommender systems without privacy measures. Although researchers have proposed various privacy-preserving recommendation frameworks, it has not been shown that such schemes are resistant to profile injection attacks. In this study, we investigate two memory-based privacy-preserving collaborative filtering algorithms and analyze their robustness against several shilling attack strategies. We first design and apply formerly proposed shilling attack techniques to privately collected databases. We analyze their effectiveness in manipulating predicted recommendations by experimenting on real data-based benchmark data sets. We show that it is still possible to manipulate the predictions significantly on databases consisting of masked preferences even though a few of the attack strategies are not effective in a privacy-preserving environment.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.1341-1368
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• 2024

The concept of privacy-preserving collaborative filtering (PPCF) has been gaining significant attention. Due to the fact that model-based recommendation methods with privacy are more efficient online, privacy-preserving memory-based scheme should be avoided in favor of model-based recommendation methods with privacy. Several studies in the current literature have examined ant colony clustering algorithms that are based on non-privacy collaborative filtering schemes. Nevertheless, the literature does not contain any studies that consider privacy in the context of ant colony clustering-based CF schema. This study employed the ant colony clustering model-based PPCF scheme. Attacks like shilling or profile injection could potentially be successful against privacy-preserving model-based collaborative filtering techniques. Afterwards, the scheme's robustness was assessed by conducting a shilling attack using six different attack models. We utilize masked data-based profile injection attacks against a privacy-preserving ant colony clustering-based prediction algorithm. Subsequently, we conduct extensive experiments utilizing authentic data to assess its robustness against profile injection attacks. In addition, we evaluate the resilience of the ant colony clustering model-based PPCF against shilling attacks by comparing it to established PPCF memory and model-based prediction techniques. The empirical findings indicate that push attack models exerted a substantial influence on the predictions, whereas nuke attack models demonstrated limited efficacy.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.81-98
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• 2009

Collaborative filtering, one of the most successful technologies among recommender systems, is a system assisting users in easily finding the useful information and supporting the decision making. However, despite of its success and popularity, one notable issue is incredibility of recommendations by unreliable users called shilling attacks. To deal with this problem, in this paper, we analyze the type of shilling attacks and propose a unique method of building a model for protecting the recommender system against manipulated ratings. In addition, we present a method of applying the model to collaborative filtering which is highly robust and stable to shilling attacks.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.4684-4705
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• 2019

Collaborative filtering recommender systems are vulnerable to shilling attacks in which malicious users may inject biased profiles to promote or demote a particular item being recommended. To tackle this problem, many robust collaborative recommendation methods have been presented. Unfortunately, the robustness of most methods is improved at the expense of prediction accuracy. In this paper, we construct a robust Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization model for collaborative filtering recommender systems by incorporating the detection of user anomaly rating behaviors. We first detect the anomaly rating behaviors of users by the modified K-means algorithm and target item identification method to generate an indicator matrix of attack users. Then we incorporate the indicator matrix of attack users to construct a robust Bayesian probabilistic matrix factorization model and based on which a robust collaborative recommendation algorithm is devised. The experimental results on the MovieLens and Netflix datasets show that our model can significantly improve the robustness and recommendation accuracy compared with three baseline methods.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.119-140
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• 2007

Recommender systems enable a user to decide which information is interesting and valuable in our world of information overload. As the recent studies of distributed computing environment have been progressing actively, recommender systems, most of which were centralized, have changed toward a peer-to-peer approach. Collaborative Filtering (CF), one of the most successful technologies in recommender systems, presents several limitations, namely sparsity, scalability, cold start, and the shilling problem, in spite of its popularity. The move from centralized systems to distributed approaches can partially improve the issues; distrust of recommendation and abuses of personal information. However, distributed systems can be vulnerable to attackers, who may inject biased profiles to force systems to adapt their objectives. In this paper, we consider both effective CF in P2P environment in order to improve overall performance of system and efficient solution of the problems related to abuses of personal data and attacks of malicious users. To deal with these issues, we propose a multi-agent framework for a distributed CF focusing on the trust relationships between individuals, i.e. web of trust. We employ an agent-based approach to improve the efficiency of distributed computing and propagate trust information among users with effect. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method brings significant improvement in terms of the distributed computing of similarity model building and the robustness of system against malicious attacks. Finally, we are planning to study trust propagation mechanisms by taking trust decay problem into consideration.