A Refined Complexity Analysis of Degree Anonymization in Graphs

Motivated by a strongly growing interest in graph anonymization, we study the NP-hard Degree Anonymity problem asking whether a graph can be made k-anonymous by adding at most a given number of edges. Herein, a graph is k-anonymous if for every vertex in the graph there are at least k−1 other vertices of the same degree. Our algorithmic results shed light on the performance quality of a popular heuristic due to Liu and Terzi [ACM SIGMOD 2008]; in particular, we show that the heuristic provides optimal solutions if “many” edges need to be added. Based on this, we develop a polynomial-time data reduction yielding a polynomial-size problem kernel for Degree Anonymity parameterized by the maximum vertex degree. In terms of parameterized complexity analysis, this result is in a sense tight since we also show that the problem is already NP-hard for H-index three, implying NP-hardness for smaller parameters such as average degree and degeneracy.