Distance Makes the Types Grow Stronger: A Calculus for Differential Privacy

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Departmental Papers (CIS)
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Computer Sciences
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We want assurances that sensitive information will not be disclosed when aggregate data derived from a database is published. Differential privacy offers a strong statistical guarantee that the effect of the presence of any individual in a database will be negligible, even when an adversary has auxiliary knowledge. Much of the prior work in this area consists of proving algorithms to be differentially private one at a time; we propose to streamline this process with a functional language whose type system automatically guarantees differential privacy, allowing the programmer to write complex privacy-safe query programs in a flexible and compositional way.T he key novelty is the way our type system captures function sensitivity, a measure of how much a function can magnify the distance between similar inputs: well-typed programs not only can’t go wrong, they can’t go too far on nearby inputs. Moreover, by introducing a monad for random computations, we can show that the established definition of differential privacy falls out naturally as a special case of this soundness principle. We develop examples including known differentially private algorithms, privacy-aware variants of standard functional programming idioms, and compositionality principles for differential privacy.

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2010-09-27
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2023-05-17T07:15:04.000
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Jason Reed and Benjamin C. Pierce. 2010. Distance makes the types grow stronger: a calculus for differential privacy. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming (ICFP '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 157-168. DOI=10.1145/1863543.1863568 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1863543.1863568 © ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, {(2010)} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1863543.1863568 " Email permissions@acm.org
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