Publications

2016
G. Barthe, N. Fong, M. Gaboardi, B. Gregoire, J. Hsu, and P.-Y. Strub. 10/2016. “Advanced Probabilistic Couplings for Differential Privacy.” 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS. PDF
Georgios Kellaris, George Kollios, Kobbi Nissim, and Adam O'Neill. 10/2016. “Generic Attacks on Secure Outsourced Databases.” 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.Abstract

Recently, various protocols have been proposed for securely outsourcing database storage to a third party server, ranging from systems with “full-fledged” security based on strong cryptographic primitives such as fully homomorphic encryption or oblivious RAM, to more practical implementations based on searchable symmetric encryption or even on deterministic and order-preserving encryption. On the flip side, various attacks have emerged that show that for some of these protocols confidentiality of the data can be compromised, usually given certain auxiliary information. We take a step back and identify a need for a formal understanding of the inherent efficiency/privacy trade-off in outsourced database systems, independent of the details of the system. We propose abstract models that capture secure outsourced storage systems in sufficient generality, and identify two basic sources of leakage, namely access pattern and communication volume. We use our models to distinguish certain classes of outsourced database systems that have been proposed, and deduce that all of them exhibit at least one of these leakage sources. We then develop generic reconstruction attacks on any system supporting range queries where either access pattern or communication volume is leaked. These attacks are in a rather weak passive adversarial model, where the untrusted server knows only the underlying query distribution. In particular, to perform our attack the server need not have any prior knowledge about the data, and need not know any of the issued queries nor their results. Yet, the server can reconstruct the secret attribute of every record in the database after about N 4 queries, where N is the domain size. We provide a matching lower bound showing that our attacks are essentially optimal. Our reconstruction attacks using communication volume apply even to systems based on homomorphic encryption or oblivious RAM in the natural way. Finally, we provide experimental results demonstrating the efficacy of our attacks on real datasets with a variety of different features. On all these datasets, after the required number of queries our attacks successfully recovered the secret attributes of every record in at most a few seconds.

PDF
Michael Bar-Sinai, Latanya Sweeney, and Merce Crosas. 8/4/2016. “DataTags, Data Handling Policy Spaces and the Tags Language.” In Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 2016 IEEE. San Jose, California : IEEE. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Widespread sharing of scientific datasets holds great promise for new scientific discoveries and great risks for personal privacy. Dataset handling policies play the critical role of balancing privacy risks and scientific value. We propose an extensible, formal, theoretical model for dataset handling policies. We define binary operators for policy composition and for comparing policy strictness, such that propositions like "this policy is stricter than that policy" can be formally phrased. Using this model, The policies are described in a machine-executable and human-readable way. We further present the Tags programming language and toolset, created especially for working with the proposed model. Tags allows composing interactive, friendly questionnaires which, when given a dataset, can suggest a data handling policy that follows legal and technical guidelines. Currently, creating such a policy is a manual process requiring access to legal and technical experts, which are not always available. We present some of Tags' tools, such as interview systems, visualizers, development environment, and questionnaire inspectors. Finally, we discuss methodologies for questionnaire development. Data for this paper include a questionnaire for suggesting a HIPAA compliant data handling policy, and formal description of the set of data tags proposed by the authors in a recent paper.

PDF
Marco Gaboardi, James Honaker, Gary King, Kobbi Nissim, Jonathan Ullman, Salil Vadhan, and Jack Murtagh. 6/2016. “PSI (Ψ): a Private data Sharing Interface.” In Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy. New York, NY. ArXiv VersionAbstract

We provide an overview of PSI (“a Private data Sharing Interface”), a system we are devel- oping to enable researchers in the social sciences and other fields to share and explore privacy- sensitive datasets with the strong privacy protections of differential privacy.

Poster presented at Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP 2016).

TPDP Poster PSI.pdf
Yiling Chen, Stephen Chong, Ian Kash, Tal Moran, and Salil Vadhan. 6/2016. “Truthful Mechanisms for Agents that Value Privacy.” ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC), 4, 3. TEAC VersionAbstract

Recent work has constructed economic mechanisms that are both truthful and differentially private. In these mechanisms, privacy is treated separately from truthfulness; it is not incorporated in players’ utility functions (and doing so has been shown to lead to nontruthfulness in some cases). In this work, we propose a new, general way of modeling privacy in players’ utility functions. Specifically, we only assume that if an outcome o has the property that any report of player i would have led to o with approximately the same probability, then o has a small privacy cost to player i. We give three mechanisms that are truthful with respect to our modeling of privacy: for an election between two candidates, for a discrete version of the facility location problem, and for a general social choice problem with discrete utilities (via a VCG-like mechanism). As the number n of players increases, the social welfare achieved by our mechanisms approaches optimal (as a fraction of n).

PDF
Toulis Panagiotis and Edoardo Airoldi. 2016. “Asymptotic and Finite-Sample Properties of Estimators based on Stochastic Gradients.” Annals of Statistics. arXiv VersionAbstract

Stochastic gradient descent procedures have gained popularity for parameter estimation from large data sets. However, their statistical properties are not well understood, in theory. And in practice, avoiding numerical instability requires careful tuning of key parameters. Here, we introduce implicit stochastic gradient descent procedures, which involve parameter updates that are implicitly defined. Intuitively, implicit updates shrink standard stochastic gradient descent updates. The amount of shrinkage depends on the observed Fisher information matrix, which does not need to be explicitly computed; thus, implicit procedures increase stability without increasing the computational burden. Our theoretical analysis provides the first full characterization of the asymptotic behavior of both standard and implicit stochastic gradient descent-based estimators, including finite-sample error bounds. Importantly, analytical expressions for the variances of these stochastic gradient-based estimators reveal their exact loss of efficiency. We also develop new algorithms to compute implicit stochastic gradient descent-based estimators for generalized linear models, Cox proportional hazards, M-estimators, in practice, and perform extensive experiments. Our results suggest that implicit stochastic gradient descent procedures are poised to become a workhorse for approximate inference from large data sets.

PDF
Vishesh Karwa, Dan Kifer, and Aleksandra Slavkovic. 2016. “Private Posterior Distributions from Variational Approximations.” NIPS 2015 Workshop on Learning and Privacy with Incomplete Data and Weak Supervision. arXiv VersionAbstract

Privacy preserving mechanisms such as differential privacy inject additional randomness in the form of noise in the data, beyond the sampling mechanism. Ignoring this additional noise can lead to inaccurate and invalid inferences. In this paper, we incorporate the privacy mechanism explicitly into the likelihood function by treating the original data as missing, with an end goal of estimating posterior distributions over model parameters. This leads to a principled way of performing valid statistical inference using private data, however, the corresponding likelihoods are intractable. In this paper, we derive fast and accurate variational approximations to tackle such intractable likelihoods that arise due to privacy. We focus on estimating posterior distributions of parameters of the naive Bayes log-linear model, where the sufficient statistics of this model are shared using a differentially private interface. Using a simulation study, we show that the posterior approximations outperform the naive method of ignoring the noise addition mechanism.

PDF
Effy Vayena and Urs Gasser. 2016. “Strictly Biomedical? Sketching the Ethics of the Big Data Ecosystem in Biomedicine.” The Ethics of Biomedical Big Data. Publisher's VersionAbstract

In today’s ever evolving data ecosystem it is evident that data generated for a wide range of purposes unrelated to biomedicine possess tremendous potential value for biomedical research. Analyses of our Google searches, social media content, loyalty card points and the like are used to draw a fairly accurate picture of our health, our future health, our attitudes towards vaccination, disease outbreaks within a county and epidemic trajectories in other continents. These data sets are different from traditional biomedical data, if a biomedical purpose is the categorical variable. Yet the results their analyses yield are of serious biomedical relevance. This paper discusses important but unresolved challenges within typical biomedical data, and it explores examples of non-biomedical Big Data with high biomedical value, including the specific conundrums these engender, especially when we apply biomedical data concepts to them. It also highlights the “digital phenotype” project, illustrating the Big Data ecosystem in action and an approach believed as likely to yield biomedical and health knowledge. We argue that to address the challenges and make full use of the opportunities that Big Data offers to biomedicine, a new ethical framework taking a data ecosystem approach is urgently needed. We conclude by discussing key components, design requirements and substantive normative elements of such a framework.

Rachel Cummings, Katrina Ligett, Kobbi Nissim, Aaron Roth, and Zhiwei Steven Wu. 2016. “Adaptive Learning with Robust Generalization Guarantees.” Conference on Learning Theory (COLT). arXiv VersionAbstract

The traditional notion of generalization---i.e., learning a hypothesis whose empirical error is close to its true error---is surprisingly brittle. As has recently been noted in [DFH+15b], even if several algorithms have this guarantee in isolation, the guarantee need not hold if the algorithms are composed adaptively. In this paper, we study three notions of generalization---increasing in strength---that are robust to postprocessing and amenable to adaptive composition, and examine the relationships between them. We call the weakest such notion Robust Generalization. A second, intermediate, notion is the stability guarantee known as differential privacy. The strongest guarantee we consider we call Perfect Generalization. We prove that every hypothesis class that is PAC learnable is also PAC learnable in a robustly generalizing fashion, with almost the same sample complexity. It was previously known that differentially private algorithms satisfy robust generalization. In this paper, we show that robust generalization is a strictly weaker concept, and that there is a learning task that can be carried out subject to robust generalization guarantees, yet cannot be carried out subject to differential privacy. We also show that perfect generalization is a strictly stronger guarantee than differential privacy, but that, nevertheless, many learning tasks can be carried out subject to the guarantees of perfect generalization.

PDF
Raef Bassily, Kobbi Nissim, Adam Smith, Thomas Steinke, Uri Stemmer, and Jonathan Ullman. 2016. “Algorithmic Stability for Adaptive Data Analysis.” 48th Annual Symposium on the Theory of Computing. arXiv VersionAbstract

Adaptivity is an important feature of data analysis---the choice of questions to ask about a dataset often depends on previous interactions with the same dataset. However, statistical validity is typically studied in a nonadaptive model, where all questions are specified before the dataset is drawn. Recent work by Dwork et al. (STOC, 2015) and Hardt and Ullman (FOCS, 2014) initiated the formal study of this problem, and gave the first upper and lower bounds on the achievable generalization error for adaptive data analysis. Specifically, suppose there is an unknown distribution P and a set of n independent samples x is drawn from P. We seek an algorithm that, given x as input, accurately answers a sequence of adaptively chosen queries about the unknown distribution P. How many samples n must we draw from the distribution, as a function of the type of queries, the number of queries, and the desired level of accuracy? In this work we make two new contributions: (i) We give upper bounds on the number of samples n that are needed to answer statistical queries. The bounds improve and simplify the work of Dwork et al. (STOC, 2015), and have been applied in subsequent work by those authors (Science, 2015, NIPS, 2015). (ii) We prove the first upper bounds on the number of samples required to answer more general families of queries. These include arbitrary low-sensitivity queries and an important class of optimization queries. As in Dwork et al., our algorithms are based on a connection with algorithmic stability in the form of differential privacy. We extend their work by giving a quantitatively optimal, more general, and simpler proof of their main theorem that stability implies low generalization error. We also study weaker stability guarantees such as bounded KL divergence and total variation distance.

PDF
Effy Vayena and Urs Gasser. 2016. “Between Openness and Privacy in Genomics.” PLoS Med , 13, 1. PLoS VersionAbstract

Summary Points

  • Advancing genomic research depends on the accessing and sharing of genomic data. However, the increasing need for sharing escalates the tension between genomic privacy and openness.
  • Promoting openness while protecting privacy is a challenge that cannot be overcome only with technical solutions such as encryption and differential privacy. Although such solutions are crucial, we still need to confront some fundamental normative tensions that are intensified in the era of genomics and big data. Here are at least three:
  • The right to genomic privacy is not an absolute right. If privacy is understood as control over information or data, privacy is not about maximal levels of control, but rather about reasonable measures of control.
  • Although individual control is necessary, it is not a sufficient safeguard of privacy. Individuals’ willingness to be open about their data does not obviate responsibility for reducing privacy risks on the part of the data users.
  • Data governance models, such as data cooperatives, that enable meaningful and continuous roles of the individuals whose data are at stake hold promise for reconciling privacy and openness.
PDF
Mark Bun and Thomas Steinke. 2016. “Concentrated Differential Privacy: Simplifications, Extensions, and Lower Bounds.” 14th Theory of Cryptography Conference. ArXiv VersionAbstract

"Concentrated differential privacy" was recently introduced by Dwork and Rothblum as a relaxation of differential privacy, which permits sharper analyses of many privacy-preserving computations. We present an alternative formulation of the concept of concentrated differential privacy in terms of the Renyi divergence between the distributions obtained by running an algorithm on neighboring inputs. With this reformulation in hand, we prove sharper quantitative results, establish lower bounds, and raise a few new questions. We also unify this approach with approximate differential privacy by giving an appropriate definition of "approximate concentrated differential privacy."

PDF
G. Barthe, P.­Y. Strub, J. Hsu, A. D. Gordon, E. J. Gallego Arias, M. Gaboardi, and G. P. Farina. 2016. “Differentially Private Bayesian Programming.” 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS. p68-barthe.pdf
Marco Gaboardi, Hyun woo Lim, Ryan Rogers, and Salil Vadhan. 2016. “Differentially Private Chi-Squared Hypothesis Testing: Goodness of Fit and Independence Testing.” Proceedings of The 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR . Publisher's VersionAbstract

Hypothesis testing is a useful statistical tool in determining whether a given model should be rejected based on a sample from the population. Sample data may contain sensitive information about individuals, such as medical information. Thus it is important to design statistical tests that guarantee the privacy of subjects in the data. In this work, we study hypothesis testing subject to differential privacy, specifically chi-squared tests for goodness of fit for multinomial data and independence between two categorical variables.
We propose new tests for goodness of fit and independence testing that like the classical versions can be used to determine whether a given model should be rejected or not, and that additionally can ensure differential privacy. We give both Monte Carlo based hypothesis tests as well as hypothesis tests that more closely follow the classical chi-squared goodness of fit test and the Pearson chi-squared test for independence. Crucially, our tests account for the distribution of the noise that is injected to ensure privacy in determining significance.
We show that these tests can be used to achieve desired significance levels, in sharp contrast to direct applications of classical tests to differentially private contingency tables which can result in wildly varying significance levels. Moreover, we study the statistical power of these tests. We empirically show that to achieve the same level of power as the classical non-private tests our new tests need only a relatively modest increase in sample size.

PDF
Effy Vayena, Urs Gasser, Alexandra Wood, David R. O'Brien, and Micah Altman. 2016. “Elements of a New Ethical Framework for Big Data Research.” Washington and Lee Law Review, 72, 3. Publisher's VersionAbstract

merging 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.

In response, this Essay outlines elements of a new ethical framework for big data research. It argues that oversight should aim to provide universal coverage of human subjects research, regardless of funding source, across all stages of the information lifecycle. New definitions and standards should be developed based on a modern understanding of privacy science and the expectations of research subjects. In addition, researchers and review boards should be encouraged to incorporate systematic risk-benefit assessments and new procedural and technological solutions from the wide range of interventions that are available. Finally, oversight mechanisms and the safeguards implemented should be tailored to the intended uses, benefits, threats, harms, and vulnerabilities associated with a specific research activity.

Development of a new ethical framework with these elements should be the product of a dynamic multistakeholder process that is designed to capture the latest scientific understanding of privacy, analytical methods, available safeguards, community and social norms, and best practices for research ethics as they evolve over time. Such a framework would support big data utilization and help harness the value of big data in a sustainable and trust-building manner.

PDF
Vishesh Karwa and Aleksandra Slavković. 2016. “Inference Using Noisy Degrees: Differentially Private Beta-Model and Synthetic Graphs.” Annals of Statistics , 44, 1, Pp. 87-112.Abstract

The β-model of random graphs is an exponential family model with the degree sequence as a sufficient statistic. In this paper, we contribute three key results. First, we characterize conditions that lead to a quadratic time algorithm to check for the existence of MLE of the β-model, and show that the MLE never exists for the degree partition β-model. Second, motivated by privacy problems with network data, we derive a differentially private estimator of the parameters of β-model, and show it is consistent and asymptotically normally distributed - it achieves the same rate of convergence as the nonprivate estimator. We present an efficient algorithm for the private estimator that can be used to release synthetic graphs. Our techniques can also be used to release degree distributions and degree partitions accurately and privately, and to perform inference from noisy degrees arising from contexts other than privacy. We evaluate the proposed estimator on real graphs and compare it with a current algorithm for releasing degree distributions and find that it does significantly better. Finally, our paper addresses shortcomings of current approaches to a fundamental problem of how to perform valid statistical inference from data released by privacy mechanisms, and lays a foundational groundwork on how to achieve optimal and private statistical inference in a principled manner by modeling the privacy mechanism; these principles should be applicable to a class of models beyond the β-model.

ArXiv PDF
Sofya Raskhodnikova and Adam Smith. 2016. “Lipschitz Extensions for Node­Private Graph Statistics and the Generalized Exponential Mechanism.” Proceedings of the 57th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS). PDF
Kobbi Nissim, Uri Stemmer, and Salil Vadhan. 2016. “Locating a Small Cluster Privately.” In PODS 2016. ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference, San Francisco, USA, 2016.Abstract

We present a new algorithm for locating a small cluster of points with differential privacy [Dwork, McSherry, Nissim,and Smith, 2006]. Our algorithm has implications to private data exploration, clustering, and removal of outliers. Furthermore, we use it to significantly relax the requirements of the sample and aggregate technique [Nissim, Raskhodnikova,and Smith, 2007], which allows compiling of "off the shelf" (non-private) analyses into analyses that preserve differential privacy.

PDF
Mark Bun and Mark Zhandry. 2016. “Order revealing encryption and the hardness of private learning.” In Proceedings of the 12th Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2016). Tel-Aviv, Israel.Abstract

An order-revealing encryption scheme gives a public procedure by which two ciphertexts can be compared to reveal the ordering of their underlying plaintexts. We show how to use order-revealing encryption to separate computationally efficient PAC learning from efficient (ϵ,δ)-differentially private PAC learning. That is, we construct a concept class that is efficiently PAC learnable, but for which every efficient learner fails to be differentially private. This answers a question of Kasiviswanathan et al. (FOCS '08, SIAM J. Comput. '11).
To prove our result, we give a generic transformation from an order-revealing encryption scheme into one with strongly correct comparison, which enables the consistent comparison of ciphertexts that are not obtained as the valid encryption of any message. We believe this construction may be of independent interest.

ArXiv PDF
Micah Altman, Alexandra Wood, David R. O'Brien, and Urs Gasser. 2016. “Practical Approaches to Big Data Privacy Over Time.” Brussels Privacy Symposium.Abstract

Increasingly, governments and businesses are collecting, analyzing, and sharing detailed information about individuals over long periods of time. Vast quantities of data from new sources and novel methods for large-scale data analysis promise to yield deeper understanding of human characteristics, behavior, and relationships and advance the state of science, public policy, and innovation. At the same time, the collection and use of fine-grained personal data over time is associated with significant risks to individuals, groups, and society at large. In this article, we examine a range of longterm data collections, conducted by researchers in social science, in order to identify the characteristics of these programs that drive their unique sets of risks and benefits. We also examine the practices that have been established by social scientists to protect the privacy of data subjects in light of the challenges presented in long-term studies. We argue that many uses of big data, across academic, government, and industry settings, have characteristics similar to those of traditional long-term research studies. In this article, we discuss the lessons that can be learned from longstanding data management practices in research and potentially applied in the context of newly emerging data sources and uses.

PDF

Pages