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Abstract
Differentially private (DP) mechanisms are difficult to interpret and
calibrate because existing methods for mapping standard privacy parameters to
concrete privacy risks -- re-identification, attribute inference, and data
reconstruction -- are both overly pessimistic and inconsistent. In this work,
we use the hypothesis-testing interpretation of DP ($f$-DP), and determine that
bounds on attack success can take the same unified form across
re-identification, attribute inference, and data reconstruction risks. Our
unified bounds are (1) consistent across a multitude of attack settings, and
(2) tunable, enabling practitioners to evaluate risk with respect to arbitrary
(including worst-case) levels of baseline risk. Empirically, our results are
tighter than prior methods using $\varepsilon$-DP, R\'enyi DP, and concentrated
DP. As a result, calibrating noise using our bounds can reduce the required
noise by 20% at the same risk level, which yields, e.g., more than 15pp
accuracy increase in a text classification task. Overall, this unifying
perspective provides a principled framework for interpreting and calibrating
the degree of protection in DP against specific levels of re-identification,
attribute inference, or data reconstruction risk.