Perfectly Private Over-the-Air Computation
It provides a foundational solution for privacy-preserving distributed computation in wireless networks, addressing a fundamental dilemma in the field.
This paper resolves the apparent conflict between perfect privacy and over-the-air computation (AirComp) by showing that real-field and modulo operations can be combined to achieve both perfect privacy and accurate computation simultaneously.
This paper studies a key research question: how to achieve perfect privacy in over-the-air computation (AirComp)? The problem is particularly intriguing due to a dilemma. Real-field operations can ensure invertibility but generally introduce statistical dependence, resulting in inevitable privacy leakage. In contrast, modulo operations can decorrelate the output from the original message, but suffer from the ill-posed invertibility when applied over non-prime groups (e.g., the real field). This raises a subtle yet fundamental question: Does perfect privacy intrinsically conflict with AirComp? We show that the answer is no. By carefully leveraging the interplay between real-field and modulo operations, perfect privacy and accurate computation can, in fact, be achieved simultaneously, enabling perfectly private aggregation.