Parallel Composition for Statistical Privacy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new privacy mechanism based on subsampling and partitioning that improves privacy and utility guarantees in statistical privacy settings, especially against limited adversaries, by leveraging distribution entropy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel composition method for statistical privacy using subsampling and partitioning, providing upper privacy bounds without database restrictions.

Findings

SP allows more queries than DP under fixed privacy and utility constraints.

Entropy-aware bounds improve privacy and utility guarantees.

The method is effective against limited adversaries in realistic scenarios.

Abstract

Differential Privacy (DP) considers a scenario in which an adversary has almost complete information about the entries of a database. This worst-case assumption is likely to overestimate the privacy threat faced by an individual in practice. In contrast, Statistical Privacy (SP), as well as related notions such as noiseless privacy or limited background knowledge privacy, describe a setting in which the adversary knows the distribution of the database entries, but not their exact realizations. In this case, privacy analysis must account for the interaction between uncertainty induced by the entropy of the underlying distributions and privacy mechanisms that distort query answers, which can be highly non-trivial. This paper investigates this problem for multiple queries (composition). A privacy mechanism is proposed that is based on subsampling and randomly partitioning the database to bound the dependency among queries. This way for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, upper privacy bounds against limited adversaries are obtained without any further restriction on the database. These bounds show that in realistic application scenarios taking the entropy of distributions into account yields improvements of privacy and precision guarantees. We illustrate examples where for fixed privacy parameters and utility loss SP allows significantly more queries than DP.