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On significance of the least significant bits for differential privacy

Published: 16 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We describe a new type of vulnerability present in many implementations of differentially private mechanisms. In particular, all four publicly available general purpose systems for differentially private computations are susceptible to our attack.
The vulnerability is based on irregularities of floating-point implementations of the privacy-preserving Laplacian mechanism. Unlike its mathematical abstraction, the textbook sampling procedure results in a porous distribution over double-precision numbers that allows one to breach differential privacy with just a few queries into the mechanism.
We propose a mitigating strategy and prove that it satisfies differential privacy under some mild assumptions on available implementation of floating-point arithmetic.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CCS '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
October 2012
1088 pages
ISBN:9781450316514
DOI:10.1145/2382196
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 16 October 2012

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Author Tags

  1. differential privacy
  2. floating point arithmetic

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CCS'12
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CCS'12: the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
October 16 - 18, 2012
North Carolina, Raleigh, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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  • (2024)Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in Biomedical Data ScienceAnnual Review of Biomedical Data Science10.1146/annurev-biodatasci-120423-1201077:1(317-343)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2024
  • (2024)"I inherently just trust that it works": Investigating Mental Models of Open-Source Libraries for Differential PrivacyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870118:CSCW2(1-39)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)A Framework for Differential Privacy Against Timing AttacksProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3690206(3615-3629)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
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