Rank aggregation with pairwise comparisons has shown promising results in
elections, sports competitions, recommendations, and information retrieval.
However, little attention has been paid to the security issue of such
algorithms, in contrast to numerous research work on the computational and
statistical characteristics. Driven by huge profits, the potential adversary
has strong motivation and incentives to manipulate the ranking list. Meanwhile,
the intrinsic vulnerability of the rank aggregation methods is not well studied
in the literature. To fully understand the possible risks, we focus on the
purposeful adversary who desires to designate the aggregated results by
modifying the pairwise data in this paper. From the perspective of the
dynamical system, the attack behavior with a target ranking list is a fixed
point belonging to the composition of the adversary and the victim. To perform
the targeted attack, we formulate the interaction between the adversary and the
victim as a game-theoretic framework consisting of two continuous operators
while Nash equilibrium is established. Then two procedures against HodgeRank
and RankCentrality are constructed to produce the modification of the original
data. Furthermore, we prove that the victims will produce the target ranking
list once the adversary masters the complete information. It is noteworthy that
the proposed methods allow the adversary only to hold incomplete information or
imperfect feedback and perform the purposeful attack. The effectiveness of the
suggested target attack strategies is demonstrated by a series of toy
simulations and several real-world data experiments. These experimental results
show that the proposed methods could achieve the attacker's goal in the sense
that the leading candidate of the perturbed ranking list is the designated one
by the adversary.