The Power of Synergy in Differential Privacy: Combining a Small Curator with Local Randomizers

Authors Amos Beimel , Aleksandra Korolova, Kobbi Nissim , Or Sheffet , Uri Stemmer



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Author Details

Amos Beimel
  • Dept. of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel
Aleksandra Korolova
  • Dept. of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Kobbi Nissim
  • Dept. of Computer Science, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
Or Sheffet
  • Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Uri Stemmer
  • Dept. of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel
  • Google Research

Acknowledgements

We thank Adam Smith for suggesting the select-then-estimate task discussed in the introduction.

Cite As Get BibTex

Amos Beimel, Aleksandra Korolova, Kobbi Nissim, Or Sheffet, and Uri Stemmer. The Power of Synergy in Differential Privacy: Combining a Small Curator with Local Randomizers. In 1st Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 163, pp. 14:1-14:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITC.2020.14

Abstract

Motivated by the desire to bridge the utility gap between local and trusted curator models of differential privacy for practical applications, we initiate the theoretical study of a hybrid model introduced by "Blender" [Avent et al., USENIX Security '17], in which differentially private protocols of n agents that work in the local-model are assisted by a differentially private curator that has access to the data of m additional users. We focus on the regime where m ≪ n and study the new capabilities of this (m,n)-hybrid model. We show that, despite the fact that the hybrid model adds no significant new capabilities for the basic task of simple hypothesis-testing, there are many other tasks (under a wide range of parameters) that can be solved in the hybrid model yet cannot be solved either by the curator or by the local-users separately. Moreover, we exhibit additional tasks where at least one round of interaction between the curator and the local-users is necessary - namely, no hybrid model protocol without such interaction can solve these tasks. Taken together, our results show that the combination of the local model with a small curator can become part of a promising toolkit for designing and implementing differential privacy.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Privacy-preserving protocols
Keywords
  • differential privacy
  • hybrid model
  • private learning
  • local model

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