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1. Triangle Counting with Local Edge Differential Privacy

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPICS.ICALP.2023.52  

   Eden, Talya; Liu, Quanquan C.; Raskhodnikova, Sofya; Smith, Adam (January 2023, Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs):50th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2023))

   Etessami, Kousha; Feige, Uriel; Puppis, Gabriele (Ed.)

   Many deployments of differential privacy in industry are in the local model, where each party releases its private information via a differentially private randomizer. We study triangle counting in the noninteractive and interactive local model with edge differential privacy (that, intuitively, requires that the outputs of the algorithm on graphs that differ in one edge be indistinguishable). In this model, each party’s local view consists of the adjacency list of one vertex. In the noninteractive model, we prove that additive Ω(n²) error is necessary, where n is the number of nodes. This lower bound is our main technical contribution. It uses a reconstruction attack with a new class of linear queries and a novel mix-and-match strategy of running the local randomizers with different completions of their adjacency lists. It matches the additive error of the algorithm based on Randomized Response, proposed by Imola, Murakami and Chaudhuri (USENIX2021) and analyzed by Imola, Murakami and Chaudhuri (CCS2022) for constant ε. We use a different postprocessing of Randomized Response and provide tight bounds on the variance of the resulting algorithm. In the interactive setting, we prove a lower bound of Ω(n^{3/2}) on the additive error. Previously, no hardness results were known for interactive, edge-private algorithms in the local model, except for those that follow trivially from the results for the central model. Our work significantly improves on the state of the art in differentially private graph analysis in the local model. 

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2. The Discrepancy of Shortest Paths

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.27  

   Bodwin, Greg; Deng, Chengyuan; Gao, Jie; Hoppenworth, Gary; Upadhyay, Jalaj; Wang, Chen (January 2024, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)

   Bringmann, Karl; Grohe, Martin; Puppis, Gabriele; Svensson, Ola (Ed.)

   The hereditary discrepancy of a set system is a quantitative measure of the pseudorandom properties of the system. Roughly speaking, hereditary discrepancy measures how well one can 2-color the elements of the system so that each set contains approximately the same number of elements of each color. Hereditary discrepancy has numerous applications in computational geometry, communication complexity and derandomization. More recently, the hereditary discrepancy of the set system of shortest paths has found applications in differential privacy [Chen et al. SODA 23]. The contribution of this paper is to improve the upper and lower bounds on the hereditary discrepancy of set systems of unique shortest paths in graphs. In particular, we show that any system of unique shortest paths in an undirected weighted graph has hereditary discrepancy O(n^{1/4}), and we construct lower bound examples demonstrating that this bound is tight up to polylog n factors. Our lower bounds hold even for planar graphs and bipartite graphs, and improve a previous lower bound of Ω(n^{1/6}) obtained by applying the trace bound of Chazelle and Lvov [SoCG'00] to a classical point-line system of Erdős. As applications, we improve the lower bound on the additive error for differentially-private all pairs shortest distances from Ω(n^{1/6}) [Chen et al. SODA 23] to Ω̃(n^{1/4}), and we improve the lower bound on additive error for the differentially-private all sets range queries problem to Ω̃(n^{1/4}), which is tight up to polylog n factors [Deng et al. WADS 23]. 

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3. Locally Private k-Means Clustering with Constant Multiplicative Approximation and Near-Optimal Additive Error

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i6.20565  

   Chaturvedi, Anamay; Jones, Matthew; Nguyen, Huy L. (January 2022, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Given a data set of size n in d'-dimensional Euclidean space, the k-means problem asks for a set of k points (called centers) such that the sum of the l_2^2-distances between the data points and the set of centers is minimized. Previous work on this problem in the local differential privacy setting shows how to achieve multiplicative approximation factors arbitrarily close to optimal, but suffers high additive error. The additive error has also been seen to be an issue in implementations of differentially private k-means clustering algorithms in both the central and local settings. In this work, we introduce a new locally private k-means clustering algorithm that achieves near-optimal additive error whilst retaining constant multiplicative approximation factors and round complexity. Concretely, given any c>sqrt(2), our algorithm achieves O(k^(1 + O(1/(2c^2-1))) * sqrt(d' n) * log d' * poly log n) additive error with an O(c^2) multiplicative approximation factor. 

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4. Manipulation Attacks in Local Differential Privacy

   https://doi.org/10.29012/jpc.754  

   Cheu, Albert; Smith, Adam; Ullman, Jonathan (February 2021, Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality)

   Local differential privacy is a widely studied restriction on distributed algorithms that collect aggregates about sensitive user data, and is now deployed in several large systems. We initiate a systematic study of a fundamental limitation of locally differentially private protocols: they are highly vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. While any algorithm can be manipulated by adversaries who lie about their inputs, we show that any noninteractive locally differentially private protocol can be manipulated to a much greater extent---when the privacy level is high, or the domain size is large, a small fraction of users in the protocol can completely obscure the distribution of the honest users' input. We also construct protocols that are optimally robust to manipulation for a variety of common tasks in local differential privacy. Finally, we give simple experiments validating our  theoretical results, and demonstrating that protocols that are optimal without manipulation can have dramatically different levels of robustness to manipulation. Our results suggest caution when deploying local differential privacy and reinforce the importance of efficient cryptographic  techniques for the distributed emulation of centrally differentially private mechanisms. 

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5. Differentially Private Clustering via Maximum Coverage

   Jones, Matthew; Nguyen, Huy L.; Nguyen, Thy D (May 2021, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   This paper studies the problem of clustering in metric spaces while preserving the privacy of individual data. Specifically, we examine differentially private variants of the k-medians and Euclidean k-means problems. We present polynomial algorithms with constant multiplicative error and lower additive error than the previous state-of-the-art for each problem. Additionally, our algorithms use a clustering algorithm without differential privacy as a black-box. This allows practitioners to control the trade-off between runtime and approximation factor by choosing a suitable clustering algorithm to use. 

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