No Arabic abstract
We summarize the experience of participating in two differential privacy competitions organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In this paper, we document our experiences in the competition, the approaches we have used, the lessons we have learned, and our call to the research community to further bridge the gap between theory and practice in DP research.
Differential privacy has become a de facto standard for releasing data in a privacy-preserving way. Creating a differentially private algorithm is a process that often starts with a noise-free (non-private) algorithm. The designer then decides where to add noise, and how much of it to add. This can be a non-trivial process -- if not done carefully, the algorithm might either violate differential privacy or have low utility. In this paper, we present DPGen, a program synthesizer that takes in non-private code (without any noise) and automatically synthesizes its differentially private version (with carefully calibrated noise). Under the hood, DPGen uses novel algorithms to automatically generate a sketch program with candidate locations for noise, and then optimize privacy proof and noise scales simultaneously on the sketch program. Moreover, DPGen can synthesize sophisticated mechanisms that adaptively process queries until a specified privacy budget is exhausted. When evaluated on standard benchmarks, DPGen is able to generate differentially private mechanisms that optimize simple utility functions within 120 seconds. It is also powerful enough to synthesize adaptive privacy mechanisms.
Differential privacy is a rigorous mathematical framework for evaluating and protecting data privacy. In most existing studies, there is a vulnerable assumption that records in a dataset are independent when differential privacy is applied. However, in real-world datasets, records are likely to be correlated, which may lead to unexpected data leakage. In this survey, we investigate the issue of privacy loss due to data correlation under differential privacy models. Roughly, we classify existing literature into three lines: 1) using parameters to describe data correlation in differential privacy, 2) using models to describe data correlation in differential privacy, and 3) describing data correlation based on the framework of Pufferfish. Firstly, a detailed example is given to illustrate the issue of privacy leakage on correlated data in real scenes. Then our main work is to analyze and compare these methods, and evaluate situations that these diverse studies are applied. Finally, we propose some future challenges on correlated differential privacy.
Releasing full data records is one of the most challenging problems in data privacy. On the one hand, many of the popular techniques such as data de-identification are problematic because of their dependence on the background knowledge of adversaries. On the other hand, rigorous methods such as the exponential mechanism for differential privacy are often computationally impractical to use for releasing high dimensional data or cannot preserve high utility of original data due to their extensive data perturbation. This paper presents a criterion called plausible deniability that provides a formal privacy guarantee, notably for releasing sensitive datasets: an output record can be released only if a certain amount of input records are indistinguishable, up to a privacy parameter. This notion does not depend on the background knowledge of an adversary. Also, it can efficiently be checked by privacy tests. We present mechanisms to generate synthetic datasets with similar statistical properties to the input data and the same format. We study this technique both theoretically and experimentally. A key theoretical result shows that, with proper randomization, the plausible deniability mechanism generates differentially private synthetic data. We demonstrate the efficiency of this generative technique on a large dataset; it is shown to preserve the utility of original data with respect to various statistical analysis and machine learning measures.
Privacy-preserving genomic data sharing is prominent to increase the pace of genomic research, and hence to pave the way towards personalized genomic medicine. In this paper, we introduce ($epsilon , T$)-dependent local differential privacy (LDP) for privacy-preserving sharing of correlated data and propose a genomic data sharing mechanism under this privacy definition. We first show that the original definition of LDP is not suitable for genomic data sharing, and then we propose a new mechanism to share genomic data. The proposed mechanism considers the correlations in data during data sharing, eliminates statistically unlikely data values beforehand, and adjusts the probability distributions for each shared data point accordingly. By doing so, we show that we can avoid an attacker from inferring the correct values of the shared data points by utilizing the correlations in the data. By adjusting the probability distributions of the shared states of each data point, we also improve the utility of shared data for the data collector. Furthermore, we develop a greedy algorithm that strategically identifies the processing order of the shared data points with the aim of maximizing the utility of the shared data. Considering the interdependent privacy risks while sharing genomic data, we also analyze the information gain of an attacker about genomes of a donors family members by observing perturbed data of the genome donor and we propose a mechanism to select the privacy budget (i.e., $epsilon$ parameter of LDP) of the donor by also considering privacy preferences of her family members. Our evaluation results on a real-life genomic dataset show the superiority of the proposed mechanism compared to the randomized response mechanism (a widely used technique to achieve LDP).
The massive collection of personal data by personalization systems has rendered the preservation of privacy of individuals more and more difficult. Most of the proposed approaches to preserve privacy in personalization systems usually address this issue uniformly across users, thus ignoring the fact that users have different privacy attitudes and expectations (even among their own personal data). In this paper, we propose to account for this non-uniformity of privacy expectations by introducing the concept of heterogeneous differential privacy. This notion captures both the variation of privacy expectations among users as well as across different pieces of information related to the same user. We also describe an explicit mechanism achieving heterogeneous differential privacy, which is a modification of the Laplacian mechanism by Dwork, McSherry, Nissim, and Smith. In a nutshell, this mechanism achieves heterogeneous differential privacy by manipulating the sensitivity of the function using a linear transformation on the input domain. Finally, we evaluate on real datasets the impact of the proposed mechanism with respect to a semantic clustering task. The results of our experiments demonstrate that heterogeneous differential privacy can account for different privacy attitudes while sustaining a good level of utility as measured by the recall for the semantic clustering task.