Crypt$ε$: Crypto-Assisted Differential Privacy on Untrusted Servers
This addresses the problem of enabling high-utility differential privacy for data analysts without requiring trusted infrastructure, though it is incremental as it builds on existing secure computation tools.
The paper tackles the trade-off between utility and privacy in differential privacy by proposing Crypt$ε$, a system that achieves the accuracy of the central model without a trusted data collector, using two non-colluding untrusted servers on encrypted data, and demonstrates feasibility with empirical evaluations on real datasets.
Differential privacy (DP) has steadily become the de-facto standard for achieving privacy in data analysis, which is typically implemented either in the "central" or "local" model. The local model has been more popular for commercial deployments as it does not require a trusted data collector. This increased privacy, however, comes at a cost of utility and algorithmic expressibility as compared to the central model. In this work, we propose, Crypt$ε$, a system and programming framework that (1) achieves the accuracy guarantees and algorithmic expressibility of the central model (2) without any trusted data collector like in the local model. Crypt$ε$ achieves the "best of both worlds" by employing two non-colluding untrusted servers that run DP programs on encrypted data from the data owners. Although straightforward implementations of DP programs using secure computation tools can achieve the above goal theoretically, in practice they are beset with many challenges such as poor performance and tricky security proofs. To this end, Crypt$ε$ allows data analysts to author logical DP programs that are automatically translated to secure protocols that work on encrypted data. These protocols ensure that the untrusted servers learn nothing more than the noisy outputs, thereby guaranteeing DP (for computationally bounded adversaries) for all Crypt$ε$ programs. Crypt$ε$ supports a rich class of DP programs that can be expressed via a small set of transformation and measurement operators followed by arbitrary post-processing. Further, we propose performance optimizations leveraging the fact that the output is noisy. We demonstrate Crypt$ε$'s feasibility for practical DP analysis with extensive empirical evaluations on real datasets.