2022

Debugging Differential Privacy: A Case Study for Privacy Auditing

Tramer, Florian, Terzis, Andreas, Steinke, Thomas et al.

Understand

Differential Privacy can provide provable privacy guarantees for training data in machine learning.

  • However, the presence of proofs does not preclude the presence of errors.
  • Inspired by recent advances in auditing which have been used for estimating lower bounds on differentially private algorithms, here we show that auditing can also be used to find flaws in (purportedly) differentially private schemes.
  • In this case study, we audit a recent open source implementation of a differentially private deep learning algorithm and find, with 99.99999999% confidence, that the implementation does not satisfy the claimed differential privacy guarantee.

Built on

  • The use of confidence or fiducial limits illustrated in the case of the binomial

    Charles J Clopper and Egon S Pearson · 1934

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • The algorithmic foundations of differential privacy

    Cynthia Dwork, Aaron Roth, et al · 2014

    Earlier work this paper cites.

  • The composition theorem for differential privacy

    Peter Kairouz, Sewoong Oh, and Pramod Viswanath · 2015

    Earlier work this paper cites.

Similar

  • Deep learning with differential privacy

    Martin Abadi, Andy Chu, Ian Goodfellow, H Brendan McMahan, Ilya Mironov, Kunal Talwar, and Li Zhang · 2016

    Cited alongside, same era.

  • Bug fix: https://github.com/mijungi/vips_code/commit/4e32042b66c960af618722a43c32f3f2dda2730c

    2018 · 2018

    Cited alongside, same era.

  • Auditing differentially private machine learning: How private is private sgd?

    Matthew Jagielski, Jonathan Ullman, and Alina Oprea · 2020

    Cited alongside, same era.

Then

  • Tensorflow privacy issue #153: Incorrect comparison between privacy amplification by iteration and DP-SGD

    Florian Tramer · 2020

    Later among the works it cites.

  • Adversary instantiation: Lower bounds for differentially private machine learning

    Milad Nasr, Shuang Songi, Abhradeep Thakurta, Nicolas Papemoti, and Nicholas Carlin · 2021

    Later among the works it cites.

  • Backpropagation clipping for deep learning with differential privacy

    Original

    Timothy Stevens, Ivoline C Ngong, David Darais, Calvin Hirsch, David Slater, and Joseph P Near · 2022

    Closest in time.

Beyond the bibliography

alphaXiv searches the wider corpus for related work and actual follow-ups.

Open on alphaXiv

alphaXiv is searching for related work…