Manoj Prabhakaran

Aman Bansal, Rahul Chunduru, Deepesh Data et al.

Differential Privacy (DP) has become a gold standard in privacy-preserving data analysis. While it provides one of the most rigorous notions of privacy, there are many settings where its applicability is limited. Our main contribution is in augmenting differential privacy with {\em Flexible Accuracy}, which allows small distortions in the input (e.g., dropping outliers) before measuring accuracy of the output, allowing one to extend DP mechanisms to high-sensitivity functions. We present mechanisms that can help in achieving this notion for functions that had no meaningful differentially private mechanisms previously. In particular, we illustrate an application to differentially private histograms, which in turn yields mechanisms for revealing the support of a dataset or the extremal values in the data. Analyses of our constructions exploit new versatile composition theorems that facilitate modular design. All the above extensions use our new definitional framework, which is in terms of "lossy Wasserstein distance" -- a 2-parameter error measure for distributions. This may be of independent interest.

Deepesh Data, Vinod M. Prabhakaran, Manoj M. Prabhakaran

In secure multiparty computation (MPC), mutually distrusting users collaborate to compute a function of their private data without revealing any additional information about their data to other users. While it is known that information theoretically secure MPC is possible among $n$ users (connected by secure and noiseless links and have access to private randomness) against the collusion of less than $n/2$ users in the honest-but-curious model, relatively less is known about the communication and randomness complexity of secure computation. In this work, we employ information theoretic techniques to obtain lower bounds on the amount of communication and randomness required for secure MPC. We restrict ourselves to a concrete interactive setting involving 3 users under which all functions are securely computable against corruption of a single user in the honest-but-curious model. We derive lower bounds for both the perfect security case (i.e., zero-error and no leakage of information) and asymptotic security (where the probability of error and information leakage vanish as block-length goes to $\infty$). Our techniques include the use of a data processing inequality for residual information (i.e., the gap between mutual information and Gács-Körner common information), a new information inequality for 3-user protocols, and the idea of distribution switching. Our lower bounds are shown to be tight for various functions of interest. In particular, we show concrete functions which have "communication-ideal" protocols, i.e., which achieve the minimum communication simultaneously on all links in the network, and also use minimum amount of randomness. Also, we obtain the first explicit example of a function that incurs a higher communication cost than the input length in the secure computation model of "Feige, Kilian, and Naor [STOC, 1994]", who had shown that such functions exist.

Vinod M. Prabhakaran, Manoj M. Prabhakaran

In this paper we generalize the notion of common information of two dependent variables introduced by Gács & Körner. They defined common information as the largest entropy rate of a common random variable two parties observing one of the sources each can agree upon. It is well-known that their common information captures only a limited form of dependence between the random variables and is zero in most cases of interest. Our generalization, which we call the Assisted Common Information system, takes into account almost-common information ignored by Gács-Körner common information. In the assisted common information system, a genie assists the parties in agreeing on a more substantial common random variable; we characterize the trade-off between the amount of communication from the genie and the quality of the common random variable produced using a rate region we call the region of tension. We show that this region has an application in deriving upperbounds on the efficiency of secure two-party sampling, which is a special case of secure multi-party computation, a central problem in modern cryptography. Two parties desire to produce samples of a pair of jointly distributed random variables such that neither party learns more about the other's output than what its own output reveals. They have access to a set up - correlated random variables whose distribution is different from the desired distribution - and noiseless communication. We present an upperbound on the rate at which a given set up can be used to produce samples from a desired distribution by showing a monotonicity property for the region of tension: a protocol between two parties can only lower the tension between their views. Then, by calculating the bounds on the region of tension of various pairs of correlated random variables, we derive bounds on the rate of secure two-party sampling.

Mohammad Mahmoody, Hemanta K. Maji, Manoj Prabhakaran

The seminal result of Impagliazzo and Rudich (STOC 1989) gave a black-box separation between one-way functions and public-key encryption: informally, a public-key encryption scheme cannot be constructed using one-way functions as the sole source of computational hardness. In addition, this implied a black-box separation between one-way functions and protocols for certain Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) functionalities (in particular, Oblivious Transfer). Surprisingly, however, {\em since then there has been no further progress in separating one-way functions and SFE functionalities} (though several other black-box separation results were shown). In this work, we present the complete picture for deterministic 2-party SFE functionalities. We show that one-way functions are black-box separated from {\em all such SFE functionalities}, except the ones which have unconditionally secure protocols (and hence do not rely on any computational hardness), when secure computation against semi-honest adversaries is considered. In the case of security against active adversaries, a black-box one-way function is indeed useful for SFE, but we show that it is useful only as much as access to an ideal commitment functionality is useful. Technically, our main result establishes the limitations of random oracles for secure computation.