Qiuyi Han, Kevin Xu, and Edoardo Airoldi. 2015. “
Consistent Estimation of Dynamic and Multi-Layer Block Models.” Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning.
arXiv VersionAbstractSignificant progress has been made recently on theoretical analysis of estimators for the stochastic block model (SBM). In this paper, we consider the multi-graph SBM, which serves as a foundation for many application settings including dynamic and multi-layer networks. We explore the asymptotic properties of two estimators for the multi-graph SBM, namely spectral clustering and the maximum-likelihood estimate (MLE), as the number of layers of the multi-graph increases. We derive sufficient conditions for consistency of both estimators and propose a variational approximation to the MLE that is computationally feasible for large networks. We verify the sufficient conditions via simulation and demonstrate that they are practical. In addition, we apply the model to two real data sets: a dynamic social network and a multi-layer social network with several types of relations.
PDF Sofya Raskhodnikova Adam and Smith. 2015. “
Differentially Private Analysis of Graphs.” Encyclopedia of Algorithms.
Latanya Sweeney. 2015. “
All the Data on All the People.” UC Berkeley Law School & GWU Law School (Berkeley Center for Law & Technology). The Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC). Berkeley, CA. .
Mercè Crosas, Gary King, James Honaker, and Latanya Sweeney. 2015. “
Automating Open Science for Big Data.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 659, 1, Pp. 260-273 .
Publisher's VersionAbstractThe vast majority of social science research uses small (megabyte- or gigabyte-scale) datasets. These fixed-scale datasets are commonly downloaded to the researcher’s computer where the analysis is performed. The data can be shared, archived, and cited with well-established technologies, such as the Dataverse Project, to support the published results. The trend toward big data—including large-scale streaming data—is starting to transform research and has the potential to impact policymaking as well as our understanding of the social, economic, and political problems that affect human societies. However, big data research poses new challenges to the execution of the analysis, archiving and reuse of the data, and reproduction of the results. Downloading these datasets to a researcher’s computer is impractical, leading to analyses taking place in the cloud, and requiring unusual expertise, collaboration, and tool development. The increased amount of information in these large datasets is an advantage, but at the same time it poses an increased risk of revealing personally identifiable sensitive information. In this article, we discuss solutions to these new challenges so that the social sciences can realize the potential of big data.
Thomas Steinke and Jon Ullman. 2015. “
Between Pure and Approximate Differential Privacy.” Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP 2015), London, UK.
TPDP Conference Version
PDF A Askarov, S. Moore, C Dimoulas, and S Chong. 2015. “
Cryptographic Enforcement of Language-Based Erasure.” Proceedings of the 28th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF).
Abstract
Information erasure is a formal security requirement that stipulates when sensitive data must be removed from computer systems. In a system that correctly enforces erasure requirements, an attacker who observes the system after sensitive data is required to have been erased cannot deduce anything about the data. Practical obstacles to enforcing information erasure include: (1) correctly determining which data requires erasure; and (2) reliably deleting potentially large volumes of data, despite untrustworthy storage services.
In this paper, we present a novel formalization of language- based information erasure that supports cryptographic enforcement of erasure requirements: sensitive data is encrypted be- fore storage, and upon erasure, only a relatively small set of decryption keys needs to be deleted. This cryptographic technique has been used by a number of systems that implement data deletion to allow the use of untrustworthy storage services. However, these systems provide no support to correctly determine which data requires erasure, nor have the formal semantic properties of these systems been explained or proven to hold. We address these shortcomings. Specifically, we study a programming language extended with primitives for public- key cryptography, and demonstrate how information-flow control mechanisms can automatically track data that requires erasure and provably enforce erasure requirements even when programs employ cryptographic techniques for erasure.
PDF Robert Faris and David R. O’Brien. 2015. “
Data and Privacy.” Internet Monitor 2014: Data and Privacy.
Online VersionAbstractThis essay first appeared in the Internet Monitor project’s second annual report, Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World. The report, published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is a collection of roughly three dozen short contributions that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year.
Shijie Zheng. 2015.
The Differential Privacy of Bayesian Inference. Bachelor's thesis, Harvard College.
DASH VersionAbstract Differential privacy is one recent framework for analyzing and quantifying the amount of privacy lost when data is released. Meanwhile, multiple imputation is an existing Bayesian-inference based technique from statistics that learns a model using real data, then releases synthetic data by drawing from that model. Because multiple imputation does not directly release any real data, it is generally believed to protect privacy.
In this thesis, we examine that claim. While there exist newer synthetic data algorithms specifically designed to provide differential privacy, we evaluate whether multiple imputation already includes differential privacy for free. Thus, we focus on several method variants for releasing the learned model and releasing the synthetic data, and how these methods perform for models taking on two common distributions: the Bernoulli and the Gaussian with known variance.
We prove a number of new or improved bounds on the amount of privacy afforded by multiple imputation for these distributions. We find that while differential privacy is ostensibly achievable for most of our method variants, the conditions needed for it to do so are often not realistic for practical usage. At least in theory, this is particularly true if we want absolute privacy (ε-differential privacy), but that the methods are more practically compatible with privacy when we allow a small probability of a catastrophic data leakage ((ε, δ)-differential privacy). |
PDF Mark Bun, Kobbi Nissim, Uri Stemmer, and Salil Vadhan. 2015. “
Differentially Private Release and Learning of Threshold Functions.” In 56th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 15). Berkeley, California.
ArXiv VersionAbstractWe prove new upper and lower bounds on the sample complexity of (ϵ,δ) differentially private algorithms for releasing approximate answers to threshold functions. A threshold function cx over a totally ordered domain X evaluates to cx(y)=1 if y≤x, and evaluates to 0 otherwise. We give the first nontrivial lower bound for releasing thresholds with (ϵ,δ) differential privacy, showing that the task is impossible over an infinite domain X, and moreover requires sample complexity n≥Ω(log∗|X|), which grows with the size of the domain. Inspired by the techniques used to prove this lower bound, we give an algorithm for releasing thresholds with n≤2(1+o(1))log∗|X| samples. This improves the previous best upper bound of 8(1+o(1))log∗|X| (Beimel et al., RANDOM '13).
Our sample complexity upper and lower bounds also apply to the tasks of learning distributions with respect to Kolmogorov distance and of properly PAC learning thresholds with differential privacy. The lower bound gives the first separation between the sample complexity of properly learning a concept class with (ϵ,δ) differential privacy and learning without privacy. For properly learning thresholds in ℓ dimensions, this lower bound extends to n≥Ω(ℓ⋅log∗|X|).
To obtain our results, we give reductions in both directions from releasing and properly learning thresholds and the simpler interior point problem. Given a database D of elements from X, the interior point problem asks for an element between the smallest and largest elements in D. We introduce new recursive constructions for bounding the sample complexity of the interior point problem, as well as further reductions and techniques for proving impossibility results for other basic problems in differential privacy.
PDF James Honaker. 2015. “
Efficient Use of Differentially Private Binary Trees.” Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP 2015), London, UK.
PDF Effy Vayena, Urs Gasser, Alexandra Wood, David R. O'Brien, and Micah Altman. 2015. “
Elements of a new Ethical Framework for Big Data Research.” In Future of Privacy Forum Workshop: Beyond IRBs: Designing Ethical Review Processes for Big Data. Washington D.C.
AbstractEmerging large-scale data sources hold tremendous potential for new scientific research into human biology, behaviors, and relationships. At the same time, big data research presents privacy and ethical challenges that the current regulatory framework is ill-suited to address. In light of the immense value of large-scale research data, the central question moving forward is not whether such data should be made available for research, but rather how the benefits can be captured in a way that respects fundamental principles of ethics and privacy.
PDF Y. Chen, K. Nissim, and B. Waggoner. 2015. “
Fair Information Sharing for Treasure Hunting.” In AAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. North America: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
Publisher's VersionAbstractIn a search task, a group of agents compete to be the first to find the solution. Each agent has different private information to incorporate into its search. This problem is inspired by settings such as scientific research, Bitcoin hash inversion, or hunting for some buried treasure. A social planner such as a funding agency, mining pool, or pirate captain might like to convince the agents to collaborate, share their information, and greatly reduce the cost of searching. However, this cooperation is in tension with the individuals' competitive desire to each be the first to win the search. The planner's proposal should incentivize truthful information sharing, reduce the total cost of searching, and satisfy fairness properties that preserve the spirit of the competition. We design contract-based mechanisms for information sharing without money. The planner solicits the agents' information and assigns search locations to the agents, who may then search only within their assignments. Truthful reporting of information to the mechanism maximizes an agent's chance to win the search. Epsilon-voluntary participation is satisfied for large search spaces. In order to formalize the planner's goals of fairness and reduced search cost, we propose a simplified, simulated game as a benchmark and quantify fairness and search cost relative to this benchmark scenario. The game is also used to implement our mechanisms. Finally, we extend to the case where coalitions of agents may participate in the mechanism, forming larger coalitions recursively.
PDF Kobbi Nissim and Uri Stemmer. 2015. “
On the Generalization Properties of Differential Privacy”.
ArXiv VersionAbstractA new line of work, started with Dwork et al., studies the task of answering statistical queries using a sample and relates the problem to the concept of differential privacy. By the Hoeffding bound, a sample of size O(logk/α2) suffices to answer k non-adaptive queries within error α, where the answers are computed by evaluating the statistical queries on the sample. This argument fails when the queries are chosen adaptively (and can hence depend on the sample). Dwork et al. showed that if the answers are computed with (ϵ,δ)-differential privacy then O(ϵ) accuracy is guaranteed with probability 1−O(δϵ). Using the Private Multiplicative Weights mechanism, they concluded that the sample size can still grow polylogarithmically with the k.
Very recently, Bassily et al. presented an improved bound and showed that (a variant of) the private multiplicative weights algorithm can answer k adaptively chosen statistical queries using sample complexity that grows logarithmically in k. However, their results no longer hold for every differentially private algorithm, and require modifying the private multiplicative weights algorithm in order to obtain their high probability bounds.
We greatly simplify the results of Dwork et al. and improve on the bound by showing that differential privacy guarantees O(ϵ) accuracy with probability 1−O(δlog(1/ϵ)/ϵ). It would be tempting to guess that an (ϵ,δ)-differentially private computation should guarantee O(ϵ) accuracy with probability 1−O(δ). However, we show that this is not the case, and that our bound is tight (up to logarithmic factors).
Xianrui Meng, Seny Kamara, Kobbi Nissim, and George Kollios. 2015. “
Grecs: Graph Encryption for Approximate Shortest Distance Queries.” The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
Publisher's VersionAbstractWe propose graph encryption schemes that efficiently support approximate shortest distance queries on large-scale encrypted graphs. Shortest distance queries are one of the most fundamental graph operations and have a wide range of applications. Using such graph encryption schemes, a client can outsource large-scale privacy-sensitive graphs to an untrusted server without losing the ability to query it. Other applications include encrypted graph databases and controlled disclosure systems. We propose GRECS (stands for GRaph EnCryption for approximate Shortest distance queries) which includes three schemes that are provably secure against any semi-honest server. Our first construction makes use of only symmetric-key operations, resulting in a computationally-efficient construction. Our second scheme, makes use of somewhat-homomorphic encryption and is less computationally-efficient but achieves optimal communication complexity (i.e., uses a minimal amount of bandwidth). Finally, our third scheme is both computationally-efficient and achieves optimal communication complexity at the cost of a small amount of additional leakage. We implemented and evaluated the efficiency of our constructions experimentally. The experiments demonstrate that our schemes are efficient and can be applied to graphs that scale up to 1.6 million nodes and 11 million edges.
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