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The Hardness of Being Private

Published: 01 March 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Kushilevitz [1989] initiated the study of information-theoretic privacy within the context of communication complexity. Unfortunately, it has been shown that most interesting functions are not privately computable [Kushilevitz 1989, Brandt and Sandholm 2008]. The unattainability of perfect privacy for many functions motivated the study of approximate privacy. Feigenbaum et al. [2010a, 2010b] define notions of worst-case as well as average-case approximate privacy and present several interesting upper bounds as well as some open problems for further study. In this article, we obtain asymptotically tight bounds on the trade-offs between both the worst-case and average-case approximate privacy of protocols and their communication cost for Vickrey auctions.
Further, we relate the notion of average-case approximate privacy to other measures based on information cost of protocols. This enables us to prove exponential lower bounds on the subjective approximate privacy of protocols for computing the Intersection function, independent of its communication cost. This proves a conjecture of Feigenbaum et al. [2010a].

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cover image ACM Transactions on Computation Theory
ACM Transactions on Computation Theory  Volume 6, Issue 1
March 2014
92 pages
ISSN:1942-3454
EISSN:1942-3462
DOI:10.1145/2600088
Issue’s Table of Contents
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 March 2014
Accepted: 01 December 2013
Revised: 01 December 2013
Received: 01 September 2012
Published in TOCT Volume 6, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Approximate privacy
  2. Vickrey auction
  3. communication complexity
  4. information theory
  5. privacy
  6. privacy trade-off

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  • (2017)Conditional Disclosure of Secrets via Non-linear ReconstructionAdvances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 201710.1007/978-3-319-63688-7_25(758-790)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2017
  • (2016)Certifying Equality With Limited InteractionAlgorithmica10.1007/s00453-016-0163-676:3(796-845)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
  • (2016)Zero-Information Protocols and Unambiguity in Arthur---Merlin CommunicationAlgorithmica10.1007/s00453-015-0104-976:3(684-719)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
  • (2015)Zero-Information Protocols and Unambiguity in Arthur-Merlin CommunicationProceedings of the 2015 Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science10.1145/2688073.2688074(113-122)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2015
  • (2015)Lower Bounds on Information Complexity via Zero-Communication Protocols and ApplicationsSIAM Journal on Computing10.1137/13092827344:5(1550-1572)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2015

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