Integer data is typically made differentially private by adding noise from a Discrete Laplace (or Discrete Gaussian) distribution. We study the setting where differential privacy of a counting query is achieved using bit-wise randomized response, i.e., independent, random bit flips on the encoding of the query answer. Binary error-correcting codes transmitted through noisy channels with independent bit flips are well-studied in information theory. However, such codes are unsuitable for differential privacy since they have (by design) high sensitivity, i.e., neighboring integers have encodings with a large Hamming distance. Gray codes show that it is possible to create an efficient sensitivity 1 encoding, but are also not suitable for differential privacy due to lack of noise-robustness. Our main result is that it is possible, with a constant rate code, to simultaneously achieve the sensitivity of Gray codes and the noise-robustness of error-correcting codes (down to the noise level required for differential privacy). An application of this new encoding of the integers is a faster, space-optimal differentially private data structure for histograms.
The Taylor expansion, which stems from Linear Logic and its differential extensions, is an approximation framework for the $\lambda$-calculus (and many of its variants). The reduction of the approximants of a $\lambda$-term induces a reduction on the $\lambda$-term itself, which enjoys a simulation property: whenever a term reduces to another, the approximants reduce accordingly. In recent work, we extended this result to an infinitary $\lambda$-calculus (namely, $\Lambda_{\infty}^{001}$). This short paper solves the question whether the converse property also holds: if the approximants of some term reduce to the approximants of another term, is there a $\beta$-reduction between these terms? This happens to be true for the $\lambda$-calculus, as we show, but our proof fails in the infinitary case. We exhibit a counter-example, refuting the conservativity for $\Lambda_{\infty}^{001}$.
We propose and study a new privacy definition, termed Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) Security. PAC security characterizes the information-theoretic hardness to recover sensitive data given arbitrary information disclosure/leakage during/after any processing. Unlike the classic cryptographic definition and Differential Privacy (DP), which consider the adversarial (input-independent) worst case, PAC security is a simulatable metric that quantifies the instance-based impossibility of inference. A fully automatic analysis and proof generation framework is proposed: security parameters can be produced with arbitrarily high confidence via Monte-Carlo simulation for any black-box data processing oracle. This appealing automation property enables analysis of complicated data processing, where the worst-case proof in the classic privacy regime could be loose or even intractable. Moreover, we show that the produced PAC security guarantees enjoy simple composition bounds and the automatic analysis framework can be implemented in an online fashion to analyze the composite PAC security loss even under correlated randomness. On the utility side, the magnitude of (necessary) perturbation required in PAC security is not lower bounded by Theta(\sqrt{d}) for a d-dimensional release but could be O(1) for many practical data processing tasks, which is in contrast to the input-independent worst-case information-theoretic lower bound. Example applications of PAC security are included with comparisons to existing works.
This paper considers subject level privacy in the FL setting, where a subject is an individual whose private information is embodied by several data items either confined within a single federation user or distributed across multiple federation users. We propose two new algorithms that enforce subject level DP at each federation user locally. Our first algorithm, called LocalGroupDP, is a straightforward application of group differential privacy in the popular DP-SGD algorithm. Our second algorithm is based on a novel idea of hierarchical gradient averaging (HiGradAvgDP) for subjects participating in a training mini-batch. We also show that user level Local Differential Privacy (LDP) naturally guarantees subject level DP. We observe the problem of horizontal composition of subject level privacy loss in FL - subject level privacy loss incurred at individual users composes across the federation. We formally prove the subject level DP guarantee for our algorithms, and also show their effect on model utility loss. Our empirical evaluation on FEMNIST and Shakespeare datasets shows that LocalGroupDP delivers the best performance among our algorithms. However, its model utility lags behind that of models trained using a DP-SGD based algorithm that provides a weaker item level privacy guarantee. Privacy loss amplification due to subject sampling fractions and horizontal composition remain key challenges for model utility.
In applications such as end-to-end encrypted instant messaging, secure email, and device pairing, users need to compare key fingerprints to detect impersonation and adversary-in-the-middle attacks. Key fingerprints are usually computed as truncated hashes of each party's view of the channel keys, encoded as an alphanumeric or numeric string, and compared out-of-band, e.g. manually, to detect any inconsistencies. Previous work has extensively studied the usability of various verification strategies and encoding formats, however, the exact effect of key fingerprint length on the security and usability of key fingerprint verification has not been rigorously investigated. We present a 162-participant study on the effect of numeric key fingerprint length on comparison time and error rate. While the results confirm some widely-held intuitions such as general comparison times and errors increasing significantly with length, a closer look reveals interesting nuances. The significant rise in comparison time only occurs when highly similar fingerprints are compared, and comparison time remains relatively constant otherwise. On errors, our results clearly distinguish between security non-critical errors that remain low irrespective of length and security critical errors that significantly rise, especially at higher fingerprint lengths. A noteworthy implication of this latter result is that Signal/WhatsApp key fingerprints provide a considerably lower level of security than usually assumed.
We propose novel statistics which maximise the power of a two-sample test based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), by adapting over the set of kernels used in defining it. For finite sets, this reduces to combining (normalised) MMD values under each of these kernels via a weighted soft maximum. Exponential concentration bounds are proved for our proposed statistics under the null and alternative. We further show how these kernels can be chosen in a data-dependent but permutation-independent way, in a well-calibrated test, avoiding data splitting. This technique applies more broadly to general permutation-based MMD testing, and includes the use of deep kernels with features learnt using unsupervised models such as auto-encoders. We highlight the applicability of our MMD-FUSE test on both synthetic low-dimensional and real-world high-dimensional data, and compare its performance in terms of power against current state-of-the-art kernel tests.
Using the computational resources of an untrusted third party to crack a password hash can pose a high number of privacy and security risks. The act of revealing the hash digest could in itself negatively impact both the data subject who created the password, and the data controller who stores the hash digest. This paper solves this currently open problem by presenting a Privacy-Preserving Password Cracking protocol (3PC), that prevents the third party cracking server from learning any useful information about the hash digest, or the recovered cleartext. This is achieved by a tailored anonymity set of decoy hashes, based on the concept of predicate encryption, where we extend the definition of a predicate function, to evaluate the output of a one way hash function. The protocol allows the client to maintain plausible deniability where the real choice of hash digest cannot be proved, even by the client itself. The probabilistic information the server obtains during the cracking process can be calculated and minimized to a desired level. While in theory cracking a larger set of hashes would decrease computational speed, the 3PC protocol provides constant-time lookup on an arbitrary list size, bounded by the input/output operation per second (IOPS) capabilities of the third party server, thereby allowing the protocol to scale efficiently. We demonstrate these claims both theoretically and in practice, with a real-life use case implemented on an FPGA architecture.
Machine learning models are susceptible to a variety of attacks that can erode trust in their deployment. These threats include attacks against the privacy of training data and adversarial examples that jeopardize model accuracy. Differential privacy and randomized smoothing are effective defenses that provide certifiable guarantees for each of these threats, however, it is not well understood how implementing either defense impacts the other. In this work, we argue that it is possible to achieve both privacy guarantees and certified robustness simultaneously. We provide a framework called DP-CERT for integrating certified robustness through randomized smoothing into differentially private model training. For instance, compared to differentially private stochastic gradient descent on CIFAR10, DP-CERT leads to a 12-fold increase in certified accuracy and a 10-fold increase in the average certified radius at the expense of a drop in accuracy of 1.2%. Through in-depth per-sample metric analysis, we show that the certified radius correlates with the local Lipschitz constant and smoothness of the loss surface. This provides a new way to diagnose when private models will fail to be robust.
Federated learning (FL) as distributed machine learning has gained popularity as privacy-aware Machine Learning (ML) systems have emerged as a technique that prevents privacy leakage by building a global model and by conducting individualized training of decentralized edge clients on their own private data. The existing works, however, employ privacy mechanisms such as Secure Multiparty Computing (SMC), Differential Privacy (DP), etc. Which are immensely susceptible to interference, massive computational overhead, low accuracy, etc. With the increasingly broad deployment of FL systems, it is challenging to ensure fairness and maintain active client participation in FL systems. Very few works ensure reasonably satisfactory performances for the numerous diverse clients and fail to prevent potential bias against particular demographics in FL systems. The current efforts fail to strike a compromise between privacy, fairness, and model performance in FL systems and are vulnerable to a number of additional problems. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey stating the basic concepts of FL, the existing privacy challenges, techniques, and relevant works concerning privacy in FL. We also provide an extensive overview of the increasing fairness challenges, existing fairness notions, and the limited works that attempt both privacy and fairness in FL. By comprehensively describing the existing FL systems, we present the potential future directions pertaining to the challenges of privacy-preserving and fairness-aware FL systems.
Node classification on graphs is a significant task with a wide range of applications, including social analysis and anomaly detection. Even though graph neural networks (GNNs) have produced promising results on this task, current techniques often presume that label information of nodes is accurate, which may not be the case in real-world applications. To tackle this issue, we investigate the problem of learning on graphs with label noise and develop a novel approach dubbed Consistent Graph Neural Network (CGNN) to solve it. Specifically, we employ graph contrastive learning as a regularization term, which promotes two views of augmented nodes to have consistent representations. Since this regularization term cannot utilize label information, it can enhance the robustness of node representations to label noise. Moreover, to detect noisy labels on the graph, we present a sample selection technique based on the homophily assumption, which identifies noisy nodes by measuring the consistency between the labels with their neighbors. Finally, we purify these confident noisy labels to permit efficient semantic graph learning. Extensive experiments on three well-known benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our CGNN over competing approaches.
Few-shot learning (FSL) methods typically assume clean support sets with accurately labeled samples when training on novel classes. This assumption can often be unrealistic: support sets, no matter how small, can still include mislabeled samples. Robustness to label noise is therefore essential for FSL methods to be practical, but this problem surprisingly remains largely unexplored. To address mislabeled samples in FSL settings, we make several technical contributions. (1) We offer simple, yet effective, feature aggregation methods, improving the prototypes used by ProtoNet, a popular FSL technique. (2) We describe a novel Transformer model for Noisy Few-Shot Learning (TraNFS). TraNFS leverages a transformer's attention mechanism to weigh mislabeled versus correct samples. (3) Finally, we extensively test these methods on noisy versions of MiniImageNet and TieredImageNet. Our results show that TraNFS is on-par with leading FSL methods on clean support sets, yet outperforms them, by far, in the presence of label noise.