Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
2-2025
Abstract
Encrypted messaging systems obstruct content moderation, although they provide end-to-end security. As a result, misinformation proliferates in these systems, thereby exacerbating online hate and harassment. The paradigm of “Reporting-then-Tracing” shows great potential in mitigating the spread of misinformation. For instance, message traceback (CCS’19) traces all the dissemination paths of a message, while source tracing (CCS’21) traces its originator. However, message traceback lacks privacy preservation for non-influential users (e.g., users who only receive the message once), while source tracing maintains privacy but only provides limited traceability. In this paper, we initiate the study of impact tracing. Intuitively, impact tracing traces influential spreaders central to disseminating misinformation while providing privacy protection for non-influential users. We introduce noises to hide noninfluential users and demonstrate that these noises do not hinder the identification of influential spreaders. Then, we formally prove our scheme’s security and show it achieves differential privacy protection for non-influential users. Additionally, we define three metrics to evaluate its traceability, correctness, and privacy using real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our scheme identifies the most influential spreaders with accuracy from 82% to 99% as the amount of noise varies. Meanwhile, our scheme requires only a 6-byte platform storage overhead for each message while maintaining a low messaging latency (
Discipline
Information Security
Areas of Excellence
Digital transformation
Publication
Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2025), San Diego, CA, USA, February 24-28
First Page
1
Last Page
18
Identifier
10.14722/ndss.2025.240980
City or Country
San Diego, USA
Citation
WANG, Zhongming; XIANG, Tao; LI, Xiaoguo; CHEN, Biwen; YANG, Guomin; MA, Chuan; and DENG, Robert H..
Impact tracing: identifying the culprit of misinformation in encrypted messaging systems. (2025). Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2025), San Diego, CA, USA, February 24-28. 1-18.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/10795
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2025.240980