A mechanism for releasing information about a statistical database with sensitive data must resolve a trade-off between utility and privacy. Privacy can be rigorously quantified using the framework of differential privacy , which requires that a mechanism's output distribution is nearly the same whether or not a given database row is included or excluded. The goal of this paper is strong and general utility guarantees, subject to differential privacy. We pursue mechanisms that guarantee near-optimal utility to every potential user, independent of its side information (modeled as a prior distribution over query results) and preferences (modeled via a loss function). Our main result is: for each fixed count query and differential privacy level, there is a geometric mechanism @math -- a discrete variant of the simple and well-studied Laplace mechanism -- that is simultaneously expected loss-minimizing for every possible user, subject to the differential privacy constraint. This is an extremely strong utility guarantee: every potential user @math , no matter what its side information and preferences, derives as much utility from @math as from interacting with a differentially private mechanism @math that is optimally tailored to @math .
Dinur and Nissim @cite_24 showed that for a database with @math rows, answering @math randomly chosen subset count queries with @math error allows an adversary to reconstruct most of the rows of the database (a blatant privacy breach); see @cite_20 for a more robust impossibility result of the same type. Most of the differential privacy literature circumvents these impossibility results by focusing on interactive models where a mechanism supplies answers to only a sub-linear (in @math ) number of queries. Count queries (e.g. @cite_24 @cite_17 ) and more general queries (e.g. @cite_8 @cite_12 ) have been studied from this perspective.
@cite_8 @cite_24 @cite_20 @cite_12 @cite_17
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We consider the problem of single-round private information retrieval (PIR) from @math replicated databases. We consider the case when @math databases are outdated (unsynchronized), or even worse, adversarial (Byzantine), and therefore, can return incorrect answers. In the PIR problem with Byzantine databases (BPIR), a user wishes to retrieve a specific message from a set of @math messages with zero-error, irrespective of the actions performed by the Byzantine databases. We consider the @math -privacy constraint in this paper, where any @math databases can collude, and exchange the queries submitted by the user. We derive the information-theoretic capacity of this problem, which is the maximum number of that can be retrieved privately (under the @math -privacy constraint) for every symbol of the downloaded data. We determine the exact BPIR capacity to be @math , if @math . This capacity expression shows that the effect of Byzantine databases on the retrieval rate is equivalent to removing @math databases from the system, with a penalty factor of @math , which signifies that even though the number of databases needed for PIR is effectively @math , the user still needs to access the entire @math databases. The result shows that for the unsynchronized PIR problem, if the user does not have any knowledge about the fraction of the messages that are mis-synchronized, the single-round capacity is the same as the BPIR capacity. Our achievable scheme extends the optimal achievable scheme for the robust PIR (RPIR) problem to correct the introduced by the Byzantine databases as opposed to in the RPIR problem. Our converse proof uses the idea of the cut-set bound in the network coding problem against adversarial nodes. This work is at theintersection of two lines of research. One line, initiated by Dinurand Nissim, investigates the price, in accuracy, of protecting privacy in a statistical database. The second, growing from an extensive literature on compressed sensing (see in particular the work of Donoho and collaborators [4,7,13,11])and explicitly connected to error-correcting codes by Candes and Tao ([4]; see also [5,3]), is in the use of linearprogramming for error correction. Our principal result is the discovery of a sharp threshhold ρ*∠ 0.239, so that if ρ In the context of privacy-preserving datamining our results say thatany privacy mechanism, interactive or non-interactive, providingreasonably accurate answers to a 0.761 fraction of randomly generated weighted subset sum queries, and arbitrary answers on the remaining 0.239 fraction, is blatantly non-private. Existing differential privacy (DP) studies mainly consider aggregation on data sets where each entry corresponds to a particular participant to be protected. In many situations, a user may pose a relational algebra query on a database with sensitive data, and desire differentially private aggregation on the result of the query. However, no existing work is able to release such aggregation when the query contains unrestricted join operations. This severely limits the applications of existing DP techniques because many data analysis tasks require unrestricted joins. One example is subgraph counting on a graph. Furthermore, existing methods for differentially private subgraph counting support only edge DP and are subject to very simple subgraphs. Until recent, whether any nontrivial graph statistics can be released with reasonable accuracy for arbitrary kind of input graphs under node DP was still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel differentially private mechanism that supports unrestricted joins, to release an approximation of a linear statistic of the result of some positive relational algebra calculation over a sensitive database. The error bound of the approximate answer is roughly proportional to the empirical sensitivity of the query --- a new notion that measures the maximum possible change to the query answer when a participant withdraws its data from the sensitive database. For subgraph counting, our mechanism provides a solution to achieve node DP, for any kind of subgraphs. In a recent paper Dinur and Nissim considered a statistical database in which a trusted database administrator monitors queries and introduces noise to the responses with the goal of maintaining data privacy [5]. Under a rigorous definition of breach of privacy, Dinur and Nissim proved that unless the total number of queries is sub-linear in the size of the database, a substantial amount of noise is required to avoid a breach, rendering the database almost useless.