Shuyu Shi

Yang Zhao, Jun Zhao, Jiawen Kang et al.

An increasing amount of users' sensitive information is now being collected for analytics purposes. To protect users' privacy, differential privacy has been widely studied in the literature. Specifically, a differentially private algorithm adds noise to the true answer of a query to generate a noisy response. As a result, the information about the dataset leaked by the noisy output is bounded by the privacy parameter. Oftentimes, a dataset needs to be used for answering multiple queries (e.g., for multiple analytics tasks), so the level of privacy protection may degrade as more queries are answered. Thus, it is crucial to keep track of the privacy spending which should not exceed the given privacy budget. Moreover, if a query has been answered before and is asked again on the same dataset, we may reuse the previous noisy response for the current query to save the privacy cost. In view of the above, we design and implement a blockchain-based system for tracking and saving differential-privacy cost. Blockchain provides a distributed immutable ledger that records each query's type, the noisy response used to answer each query, the associated noise level added to the true query result, and the remaining privacy budget in our system. Furthermore, since the blockchain records the noisy response used to answer each query, we also design an algorithm to reuse previous noisy response if the same query is asked repeatedly. Specifically, considering that different requests of the same query may have different privacy requirements, our algorithm (via a rigorous proof) is able to set the optimal reuse fraction of the old noisy response and add new noise (if necessary) to minimize the accumulated privacy cost. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the privacy cost significantly without compromising data accuracy.

Zhiying Xu, Shuyu Shi, Alex X. Liu et al.

With the advent of the era of big data, deep learning has become a prevalent building block in a variety of machine learning or data mining tasks, such as signal processing, network modeling and traffic analysis, to name a few. The massive user data crowdsourced plays a crucial role in the success of deep learning models. However, it has been shown that user data may be inferred from trained neural models and thereby exposed to potential adversaries, which raises information security and privacy concerns. To address this issue, recent studies leverage the technique of differential privacy to design private-preserving deep learning algorithms. Albeit successful at privacy protection, differential privacy degrades the performance of neural models. In this paper, we develop ADADP, an adaptive and fast convergent learning algorithm with a provable privacy guarantee. ADADP significantly reduces the privacy cost by improving the convergence speed with an adaptive learning rate and mitigates the negative effect of differential privacy upon the model accuracy by introducing adaptive noise. The performance of ADADP is evaluated on real-world datasets. Experiment results show that it outperforms state-of-the-art differentially private approaches in terms of both privacy cost and model accuracy.

Jun Zhao, Teng Wang, Tao Bai et al.

Differential privacy provides a rigorous framework to quantify data privacy, and has received considerable interest recently. A randomized mechanism satisfying $(ε, δ)$-differential privacy (DP) roughly means that, except with a small probability $δ$, altering a record in a dataset cannot change the probability that an output is seen by more than a multiplicative factor $e^ε $. A well-known solution to $(ε, δ)$-DP is the Gaussian mechanism initiated by Dwork et al. [1] in 2006 with an improvement by Dwork and Roth [2] in 2014, where a Gaussian noise amount $\sqrt{2\ln \frac{2}δ} \times \fracΔε$ of [1] or $\sqrt{2\ln \frac{1.25}δ} \times \fracΔε$ of [2] is added independently to each dimension of the query result, for a query with $\ell_2$-sensitivity $Δ$. Although both classical Gaussian mechanisms [1,2] assume $0 < ε\leq 1$, our review finds that many studies in the literature have used the classical Gaussian mechanisms under values of $ε$ and $δ$ where the added noise amounts of [1,2] do not achieve $(ε,δ)$-DP. We obtain such result by analyzing the optimal noise amount $σ_{DP-OPT}$ for $(ε,δ)$-DP and identifying $ε$ and $δ$ where the noise amounts of classical mechanisms are even less than $σ_{DP-OPT}$. Since $σ_{DP-OPT}$ has no closed-form expression and needs to be approximated in an iterative manner, we propose Gaussian mechanisms by deriving closed-form upper bounds for $σ_{DP-OPT}$. Our mechanisms achieve $(ε,δ)$-DP for any $ε$, while the classical mechanisms [1,2] do not achieve $(ε,δ)$-DP for large $ε$ given $δ$. Moreover, the utilities of our mechanisms improve those of [1,2] and are close to that of the optimal yet more computationally expensive Gaussian mechanism.

Wubing Chen, Zhiying Xu, Shuyu Shi et al.

Blockchains have received much attention recently since they provide decentralized approaches to the creation and management of value. Many banks, Internet companies, car manufacturers, and even governments worldwide have incorporated or started considering blockchains to improve the security, scalability, and efficiency of their services. In this paper, we survey blockchain applications in different areas. These areas include cryptocurrency, healthcare, advertising, insurance, copyright protection, energy, and societal applications. Our work provides a timely summary for individuals and organizations interested in blockchains. We envision our study to motivate more blockchain applications.