Differential Privacy of Network Parameters from a System Identification Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Campbell, Andrew, Scaglione, Anna, Liu, Hang, Elvira, Victor, Peisert, Sean, Arnold, Daniel
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866909817639010304
author Campbell, Andrew
Scaglione, Anna
Liu, Hang
Elvira, Victor
Peisert, Sean
Arnold, Daniel
author_facet Campbell, Andrew
Scaglione, Anna
Liu, Hang
Elvira, Victor
Peisert, Sean
Arnold, Daniel
contents This paper addresses the problem of protecting network information from privacy system identification (SI) attacks when sharing cyber-physical system simulations. We model analyst observations of networked states as time-series outputs of a graph filter driven by differentially private (DP) nodal excitations, with the analyst aiming to infer the underlying graph shift operator (GSO). Unlike traditional SI, which estimates system parameters, we study the inverse problem: what assumptions prevent adversaries from identifying the GSO while preserving utility for legitimate analysis. We show that applying DP mechanisms to inputs provides formal privacy guarantees for the GSO, linking the $(ε,δ)$-DP bound to the spectral properties of the graph filter and noise covariance. More precisely, for DP Gaussian signals, the spectral characteristics of both the filter and noise covariance determine the privacy bound, with smooth filters and low-condition-number covariance yielding greater privacy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_20460
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differential Privacy of Network Parameters from a System Identification Perspective
Campbell, Andrew
Scaglione, Anna
Liu, Hang
Elvira, Victor
Peisert, Sean
Arnold, Daniel
Cryptography and Security
Signal Processing
This paper addresses the problem of protecting network information from privacy system identification (SI) attacks when sharing cyber-physical system simulations. We model analyst observations of networked states as time-series outputs of a graph filter driven by differentially private (DP) nodal excitations, with the analyst aiming to infer the underlying graph shift operator (GSO). Unlike traditional SI, which estimates system parameters, we study the inverse problem: what assumptions prevent adversaries from identifying the GSO while preserving utility for legitimate analysis. We show that applying DP mechanisms to inputs provides formal privacy guarantees for the GSO, linking the $(ε,δ)$-DP bound to the spectral properties of the graph filter and noise covariance. More precisely, for DP Gaussian signals, the spectral characteristics of both the filter and noise covariance determine the privacy bound, with smooth filters and low-condition-number covariance yielding greater privacy.
title Differential Privacy of Network Parameters from a System Identification Perspective
topic Cryptography and Security
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20460