Pufferfish Privacy: An Information-Theoretic Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nuradha, Theshani, Goldfeld, Ziv
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Nuradha, Theshani
Goldfeld, Ziv
author_facet Nuradha, Theshani
Goldfeld, Ziv
contents Pufferfish privacy (PP) is a generalization of differential privacy (DP), that offers flexibility in specifying sensitive information and integrates domain knowledge into the privacy definition. Inspired by the illuminating formulation of DP in terms of mutual information due to Cuff and Yu, this work explores PP through the lens of information theory. We provide an information-theoretic formulation of PP, termed mutual information PP (MI PP), in terms of the conditional mutual information between the mechanism and the secret, given the public information. We show that MI PP is implied by the regular PP and characterize conditions under which the reverse implication is also true, recovering the relationship between DP and its information-theoretic variant as a special case. We establish convexity, composability, and post-processing properties for MI PP mechanisms and derive noise levels for the Gaussian and Laplace mechanisms. The obtained mechanisms are applicable under relaxed assumptions and provide improved noise levels in some regimes. Lastly, applications to auditing privacy frameworks, statistical inference tasks, and algorithm stability are explored.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2210_12612
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pufferfish Privacy: An Information-Theoretic Study
Nuradha, Theshani
Goldfeld, Ziv
Information Theory
Pufferfish privacy (PP) is a generalization of differential privacy (DP), that offers flexibility in specifying sensitive information and integrates domain knowledge into the privacy definition. Inspired by the illuminating formulation of DP in terms of mutual information due to Cuff and Yu, this work explores PP through the lens of information theory. We provide an information-theoretic formulation of PP, termed mutual information PP (MI PP), in terms of the conditional mutual information between the mechanism and the secret, given the public information. We show that MI PP is implied by the regular PP and characterize conditions under which the reverse implication is also true, recovering the relationship between DP and its information-theoretic variant as a special case. We establish convexity, composability, and post-processing properties for MI PP mechanisms and derive noise levels for the Gaussian and Laplace mechanisms. The obtained mechanisms are applicable under relaxed assumptions and provide improved noise levels in some regimes. Lastly, applications to auditing privacy frameworks, statistical inference tasks, and algorithm stability are explored.
title Pufferfish Privacy: An Information-Theoretic Study
topic Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12612