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615
Robust de-anonymization of large sparse datasets
- In Proc. of SP ’08, IEEE Computer Society
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A learning theory approach to non-interactive database privacy
- In Proceedings of the 40th annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
, 2008
"... In this paper we demonstrate that, ignoring computational constraints, it is possible to release synthetic databases that are useful for accurately answering large classes of queries while preserving differential privacy. Specifically, we give a mechanism that privately releases synthetic data usefu ..."
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Cited by 222 (25 self)
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In this paper we demonstrate that, ignoring computational constraints, it is possible to release synthetic databases that are useful for accurately answering large classes of queries while preserving differential privacy. Specifically, we give a mechanism that privately releases synthetic data useful for answering a class of queries over a discrete domain with error that grows as a function of the size of the smallest net approximately representing the answers to that class of queries. We show that this in particular implies a mechanism for counting queries that gives error guarantees that grow only with the VC-dimension of the class of queries, which itself grows at most logarithmically with the size of the query class. We also show that it is not possible to release even simple classes of queries (such as intervals and their generalizations) over continuous domains with worst-case utility guarantees while preserving differential privacy. In response to this, we consider a relaxation of the utility guarantee and give a privacy preserving polynomial time algorithm that for any halfspace query will provide an answer that is accurate for some small perturbation of the query. This algorithm does not release synthetic data, but instead another data structure capable of representing an answer for each query. We also give an efficient algorithm for releasing synthetic data for the class of interval queries and axis-aligned rectangles of constant dimension over discrete domains. 1.
De-anonymizing social networks
, 2009
"... Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc. We present ..."
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Cited by 206 (6 self)
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Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc. We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized socialnetwork graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on realworld networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12 % error rate. Our de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network topology, does not require creation of a large number of dummy “sybil” nodes, is robust to noise and all existing defenses, and works even when the overlap between the target network and the adversary’s auxiliary information is small.
Mechanism design via differential privacy
- Proceedings of the 48th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
, 2007
"... We study the role that privacy-preserving algorithms, which prevent the leakage of specific information about participants, can play in the design of mechanisms for strategic agents, which must encourage players to honestly report information. Specifically, we show that the recent notion of differen ..."
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Cited by 205 (3 self)
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We study the role that privacy-preserving algorithms, which prevent the leakage of specific information about participants, can play in the design of mechanisms for strategic agents, which must encourage players to honestly report information. Specifically, we show that the recent notion of differential privacy [15, 14], in addition to its own intrinsic virtue, can ensure that participants have limited effect on the outcome of the mechanism, and as a consequence have limited incentive to lie. More precisely, mechanisms with differential privacy are approximate dominant strategy under arbitrary player utility functions, are automatically resilient to coalitions, and easily allow repeatability. We study several special cases of the unlimited supply auction problem, providing new results for digital goods auctions, attribute auctions, and auctions with arbitrary structural constraints on the prices. As an important prelude to developing a privacy-preserving auction mechanism, we introduce and study a generalization of previous privacy work that accommodates the high sensitivity of the auction setting, where a single participant may dramatically alter the optimal fixed price, and a slight change in the offered price may take the revenue from optimal to zero. 1
Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing: A Survey on Recent Developments
"... The collection of digital information by governments, corporations, and individuals has created tremendous opportunities for knowledge- and information-based decision making. Driven by mutual benefits, or by regulations that require certain data to be published, there is a demand for the exchange an ..."
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Cited by 203 (16 self)
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The collection of digital information by governments, corporations, and individuals has created tremendous opportunities for knowledge- and information-based decision making. Driven by mutual benefits, or by regulations that require certain data to be published, there is a demand for the exchange and publication of data among various parties. Data in its original form, however, typically contains sensitive information about individuals, and publishing such data will violate individual privacy. The current practice in data publishing relies mainly on policies and guidelines as to what types of data can be published, and agreements on the use of published data. This approach alone may lead to excessive data distortion or insufficient protection. Privacy-preserving data publishing (PPDP) provides methods and tools for publishing useful information while preserving data privacy. Recently, PPDP has received considerable attention in research communities, and many approaches have been proposed for different data publishing scenarios. In this survey, we will systematically summarize and evaluate different approaches to PPDP, study the challenges in practical data publishing, clarify the differences and requirements that distinguish PPDP from other related problems, and propose future research directions.
Smooth sensitivity and sampling in private data analysis
- In STOC
, 2007
"... We introduce a new, generic framework for private data analysis. The goal of private data analysis is to release aggregate information about a data set while protecting the privacy of the individuals whose information the data set contains. Our framework allows one to release functions f of the data ..."
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Cited by 168 (16 self)
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We introduce a new, generic framework for private data analysis. The goal of private data analysis is to release aggregate information about a data set while protecting the privacy of the individuals whose information the data set contains. Our framework allows one to release functions f of the data with instance-based additive noise. That is, the noise magnitude is determined not only by the function we want to release, but also by the database itself. One of the challenges is to ensure that the noise magnitude does not leak information about the database. To address that, we calibrate the noise magnitude to the smooth sensitivity of f on the database x — a measure of variability of f in the neighborhood of the instance x. The new framework greatly expands the applicability of output perturbation, a technique for protecting individuals ’ privacy by adding a small amount of random noise to the released statistics. To our knowledge, this is the first formal analysis of the effect of instance-based noise in the context of data privacy. Our framework raises many interesting algorithmic questions. Namely, to apply the framework one must compute or approximate the smooth sensitivity of f on x. We show how to do this efficiently for several different functions, including the median and the cost of the minimum spanning tree. We also give a generic procedure based on sampling that allows one to release f(x) accurately on many databases x. This procedure is applicable even when no efficient algorithm for approximating smooth sensitivity of f is known or when f is given as a black box. We illustrate the procedure by applying it to k-SED (k-means) clustering and learning mixtures of Gaussians.
A firm foundation for private data analysis
- Commun. ACM
"... In the information realm, loss of privacy is usually associated with failure to control access to information, to control the flow of information, or to control the purposes for which information is employed. Differential privacy arose in a context in which ensuring privacy is a challenge even if al ..."
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Cited by 134 (3 self)
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In the information realm, loss of privacy is usually associated with failure to control access to information, to control the flow of information, or to control the purposes for which information is employed. Differential privacy arose in a context in which ensuring privacy is a challenge even if all these control problems are solved: privacy-preserving statistical analysis of data. The problem of statistical disclosure control – revealing accurate statistics about a set of respondents while preserving the privacy of individuals – has a venerable history, with an extensive literature spanning statistics, theoretical computer science, security, databases, and cryptography (see, for example, the excellent survey [1], the discussion of related work in [2] and the Journal of Official Statistics 9 (2), dedicated to confidentiality and disclosure control). This long history
To join or not to join: the illusion of privacy in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles
- In WWW
, 2009
"... In order to address privacy concerns, many social media websites allow users to hide their personal profiles from the public. In this work, we show how an adversary can exploit an online social network with a mixture of public and private user profiles to predict the private attributes of users. We ..."
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Cited by 106 (3 self)
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In order to address privacy concerns, many social media websites allow users to hide their personal profiles from the public. In this work, we show how an adversary can exploit an online social network with a mixture of public and private user profiles to predict the private attributes of users. We map this problem to a relational classification problem and we propose practical models that use friendship and group membership information (which is often not hidden) to infer sensitive attributes. The key novel idea is that in addition to friendship links, groups can be carriers of significant information. We show that on several well-known social media sites, we can easily and accurately recover the information of private-profile users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses link-based and group-based classification to study privacy implications in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles.
What Can We Learn Privately?
- 49TH ANNUAL IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON FOUNDATIONS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
, 2008
"... Learning problems form an important category of computational tasks that generalizes many of the computations researchers apply to large real-life data sets. We ask: what concept classes can be learned privately, namely, by an algorithm whose output does not depend too heavily on any one input or sp ..."
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Cited by 99 (10 self)
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Learning problems form an important category of computational tasks that generalizes many of the computations researchers apply to large real-life data sets. We ask: what concept classes can be learned privately, namely, by an algorithm whose output does not depend too heavily on any one input or specific training example? More precisely, we investigate learning algorithms that satisfy differential privacy, a notion that provides strong confidentiality guarantees in the contexts where aggregate information is released about a database containing sensitive information about individuals. We present several basic results that demonstrate general feasibility of private learning and relate several models previously studied separately in the contexts of privacy and standard learning.
Universally Utility-Maximizing Privacy Mechanisms
"... A mechanism for releasing information about a statistical database with sensitive data must resolve a trade-off between utility and privacy. Publishing fully accurate information maximizes utility while minimizing privacy, while publishing random noise accomplishes the opposite. Privacy can be rigor ..."
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Cited by 94 (2 self)
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A mechanism for releasing information about a statistical database with sensitive data must resolve a trade-off between utility and privacy. Publishing fully accurate information maximizes utility while minimizing privacy, while publishing random noise accomplishes the opposite. 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 M ∗ — 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 u, no matter what its side information and preferences, derives as much utility from M ∗ as from interacting with a differentially private mechanism Mu that is optimally tailored to u. More precisely, for every user u there is an optimal mecha-
