Computing Maximal Per-Record Leakage and Leakage-Distortion Functions for Privacy Mechanisms under Entropy-Constrained Adversaries
This work addresses privacy protection for data collection under realistic adversary assumptions, providing a computational framework for auditing risks and designing mechanisms, though it is incremental as it builds on existing information-theoretic concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of information disclosure against adversaries with bounded prior knowledge by studying maximal per-record leakage and leakage-distortion tradeoffs, developing efficient alternating optimization algorithms that showed improved privacy-utility tradeoffs over classical differential privacy mechanisms in experiments.
The exponential growth of data collection necessitates robust privacy protections that preserve data utility. We address information disclosure against adversaries with bounded prior knowledge, modeled by an entropy constraint $H(X) \geq b$. Within this information privacy framework -- which replaces differential privacy's independence assumption with a bounded-knowledge model -- we study three core problems: maximal per-record leakage, the primal leakage-distortion tradeoff (minimizing worst-case leakage under distortion $D$), and the dual distortion minimization (minimizing distortion under leakage constraint $L$). These problems resemble classical information-theoretic ones (channel capacity, rate-distortion) but are more complex due to high dimensionality and the entropy constraint. We develop efficient alternating optimization algorithms that exploit convexity-concavity duality, with theoretical guarantees including local convergence for the primal problem and convergence to a stationary point for the dual. Experiments on binary symmetric channels and modular sum queries validate the algorithms, showing improved privacy-utility tradeoffs over classical differential privacy mechanisms. This work provides a computational framework for auditing privacy risks and designing certified mechanisms under realistic adversary assumptions.