A Unified Framework for Adversary-Aware Differential Privacy Bounds

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Swanberg, Marika, Annamalai, Meenatchi Sundaram Muthu Selva, Hayes, Jamie, Balle, Borja, Smith, Adam
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Swanberg, Marika
Annamalai, Meenatchi Sundaram Muthu Selva
Hayes, Jamie
Balle, Borja
Smith, Adam
author_facet Swanberg, Marika
Annamalai, Meenatchi Sundaram Muthu Selva
Hayes, Jamie
Balle, Borja
Smith, Adam
contents Differential Privacy (DP) bounds the privacy leakage of a mechanism against worst-case membership inference, but the precise tradeoff between complex adversarial models and DP protections remains poorly understood. In this paper, we present a unified framework that generalizes the patchwork of existing bounds across membership inference, attribute inference, and data reconstruction attacks. Crucially, our framework is the first to evaluate attacks that target multiple individuals simultaneously and measure success beyond exact matches under a single cohesive bound. Our bounds capture this broad family of previously unexplored attack settings by relying solely on the privacy parameters and the adversary's baseline success rate (i.e. its prior without access to the mechanism's output). To illustrate this, we compare our high-probability guarantees to empirical attacks in two novel settings: extracting multiple non-uniform secrets (passwords and PII) from DP-finetuned language models, and reconstructing tabular data from noisy marginals. Ultimately, this framework provides a rigorous theoretical foundation to investigate the risk landscape of DP algorithms in new adversarial settings.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Unified Framework for Adversary-Aware Differential Privacy Bounds
Swanberg, Marika
Annamalai, Meenatchi Sundaram Muthu Selva
Hayes, Jamie
Balle, Borja
Smith, Adam
Cryptography and Security
Differential Privacy (DP) bounds the privacy leakage of a mechanism against worst-case membership inference, but the precise tradeoff between complex adversarial models and DP protections remains poorly understood. In this paper, we present a unified framework that generalizes the patchwork of existing bounds across membership inference, attribute inference, and data reconstruction attacks. Crucially, our framework is the first to evaluate attacks that target multiple individuals simultaneously and measure success beyond exact matches under a single cohesive bound. Our bounds capture this broad family of previously unexplored attack settings by relying solely on the privacy parameters and the adversary's baseline success rate (i.e. its prior without access to the mechanism's output). To illustrate this, we compare our high-probability guarantees to empirical attacks in two novel settings: extracting multiple non-uniform secrets (passwords and PII) from DP-finetuned language models, and reconstructing tabular data from noisy marginals. Ultimately, this framework provides a rigorous theoretical foundation to investigate the risk landscape of DP algorithms in new adversarial settings.
title A Unified Framework for Adversary-Aware Differential Privacy Bounds
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08158