Personality Privacy Protection Method of Social Users Based on Generative Adversarial Networks

Abstract

Obscuring or otherwise minimizing the release of personality information from potential victims of social engineering attacks effectively interferes with an attacker’s personality analysis and reduces the success rate of social engineering attacks. We propose a text transformation method named PerTransGAN using generative adversarial networks (GANs) to protect the personality privacy hidden in text data. Making use of reinforcement learning, we use the output of the discriminator as a reward signal to guide the training of the generator. Moreover, the model extracts text features from the discriminator network as additional semantic guidance signals. And the loss function of the generator adds a penalty item to reduce the weight of words that contribute more to personality information in the real text so as to hide the user’s personality privacy. In addition, the semantic and personality modules are designed to calculate the semantic similarity and personality distribution distance between the real text and the generated text as a part of the objective function. Experiments show that the self-attention module and semantic module in the generator improved the content retention of the text by 0.11 compared with the baseline model and obtained the highest BLEU score. In addition, with the addition of penalty item and personality module, compared with the classification accuracy of the original data, the accuracy of the generated text in the personality classifier decreased by 20%. PerTransGAN model preserves users’ personality privacy as found in user data by transforming the text and preserving semantic similarity while blocking privacy theft by attackers.

A comprehensive survey on social engineering-based attacks on social networks

“…Lastly, openness involves using creativity and imagination to gain access. The personality model of social engineering is based on direct communication (Sui et al, 2022), as it involves using persuasive language and tactics to directly interact with the victim and influence their decision-making (Eftimie et al, 2022).…”

Supervised Character Resemble Substitution Personality Adversarial Method

“…To verify the performance of the SCRS method, we compared it with the PerTransGAN method proposed in our team's previous work [26]. The SCRS method uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) to protect the privacy of the personalities hidden in text data through text transformation.…”