Webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOu-sTV8J2M

This chapter explains how administrative data containing personal information can be collected, analyzed, and published in a way that ensures the individuals in the data will be afforded the strong protections of differential privacy.

It is intended as a practical resource for government agencies and research organizations interested in exploring the possibility of implementing tools for differentially private data sharing and analysis. Using intuitive examples rather than the mathematical formalism used in other guides, this chapter introduces the differential privacy definition and the risks it was developed to address. The text employs modern privacy frameworks to explain how to determine whether the use of differential privacy is an appropriate solution in a given setting. It also discusses the design considerations one should take into account when implementing differential privacy. This discussion incorporates a review of real-world implementations, including tools designed for tiered access systems combining differential privacy with other disclosure controls presented in this Handbook, such as consent mechanisms, data use agreements, and secure environments.

Differential privacy technology has passed a preliminary transition from being the subject of academic work to initial implementations by large organizations and high-tech companies that have the expertise to develop and implement customized differentially private methods. With a growing collection of software packages for generating differentially private releases from summary statistics to machine learning models, differential privacy is now transitioning to being usable more widely and by smaller organizations.

• View a talk on this paper presented at the 2020 OpenDP Community Meeting
• View a talk on this paper presented at TPDP 2020

OpenDP is led by Faculty Directors Gary King and Salil Vadhan and an Executive Committee at Harvard University, funded in part by a grant from the Sloan Foundation. Its efforts so far have included implementing a differentially private curator application in collaboration with Microsoft, and developing a framework for a community-driven OpenDP Commons through the work of an Ad Hoc Design Committee including external experts. Going forward, the project plans to engage with a wide community of stakeholders, establish partnerships with a wide variety of groups from industry, academia, and government, and adopt increasing levels of community governance.

In this survey, we present several computational analogues of entropy and illustrate how they are useful for constructing cryptographic primitives. Specifically, we focus on constructing pseudorandom generators and statistically hiding commitments from arbitrary one-way functions, and demonstrate that:

1. The security properties of these (and other) cryptographic primitives can be understood in terms of various computational analogues of entropy, and in particular how these computational measures of entropy can be very different from real, information-theoretic entropy.
2. It can be shown that every one-way function directly exhibits some gaps between real entropy and the various computational entropies.
3. Thus we can construct the desired cryptographic primitives by amplifying and manipulating the entropy gaps in a one-way function, through forms of repetition and hashing.

The constructions we present (which are from the past decade) are much simpler and more efficient than the original ones, and are based entirely on natural manipulations of new notions of computational entropy. The two constructions are "dual" to each other, whereby the construction of pseudorandom generators relies on a form of computational entropy ("pseudoentropy") being larger than the real entropy, while the construction of statistically hiding commitments relies on a form of computational entropy ("accessible entropy") being smaller than the real entropy. Beyond that difference, the two constructions share a common structure, using a very similar sequence of manipulations of real and computational entropy. As a warmup, we also "deconstruct" the classic construction of pseudorandom generators from one-way permutations using the modern language of computational entropy.

This survey is written in honor of Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali.

Version History: Preliminary version workshopped at PLSC 2017.

Differential privacy is a formal mathematical framework for quantifying and managing privacy risks. It provides provable privacy protection against a wide range of potential attacks, including those currently unforeseen. Differential privacy is primarily studied in the context of the collection, analysis, and release of aggregate statistics. These range from simple statistical estimations, such as averages, to machine learning. Tools for differentially private analysis are now in early stages of implementation and use across a variety of academic, industry, and government settings. Interest in the concept is growing among potential users of the tools, as well as within legal and policy communities, as it holds promise as a potential approach to satisfying legal requirements for privacy protection when handling personal information. In particular, differential privacy may be seen as a technical solution for analyzing and sharing data while protecting the privacy of individuals in accordance with existing legal or policy requirements for de-identification or disclosure limitation.

This primer seeks to introduce the concept of differential privacy and its privacy implications to non-technical audiences. It provides a simplified and informal, but mathematically accurate, description of differential privacy. Using intuitive illustrations and limited mathematical formalism, it discusses the definition of differential privacy, how differential privacy addresses privacy risks, how differentially private analyses are constructed, and how such analyses can be used in practice. A series of illustrations is used to show how practitioners and policymakers can conceptualize the guarantees provided by differential privacy. These illustrations are also used to explain related concepts, such as composition (the accumulation of risk across multiple analyses), privacy loss parameters, and privacy budgets. This primer aims to provide a foundation that can guide future decisions when analyzing and sharing statistical data about individuals, informing individuals about the privacy protection they will be afforded, and designing policies and regulations for robust privacy protection.

Version History: 

Earlier versions: May 2017: ECCC TR 17-084

Dec. 2017: ECCC TR 17-084 (revised)

Computational analogues of information-theoretic notions have given rise to some of the most interesting phenomena in the theory of computation. For example, computational indistinguishability, Goldwasser and Micali [9], which is the computational analogue of statistical distance, enabled the bypassing of Shannon’s impossibility results on perfectly secure encryption, and provided the basis for the computational theory of pseudorandomness. Pseudoentropy, Håstad, Impagliazzo, Levin, and Luby [17], a computational analogue of entropy, was the key to the fundamental result establishing the equivalence of pseudorandom generators and one-way functions, and has become a basic concept in complexity theory and cryptography.

This tutorial discusses two rather recent computational notions of entropy, both of which can be easily found in any one-way function, the most basic cryptographic primitive. The first notion is next-block pseudoentropy, Haitner, Reingold, and Vadhan [14], a refinement of pseudoentropy that enables simpler and more ecient construction of pseudorandom generators. The second is inaccessible entropy, Haitner, Reingold, Vadhan, andWee [11], which relates to unforgeability and is used to construct simpler and more efficient universal one-way hash functions and statistically hiding commitments.

Version History: 

August 2016: Manuscript v1 (see files attached)

March 2017: Manuscript v2 (see files attached); Errata

April 2017: Published Version (in Tutorials on the Foundations of Cryptography; see Publisher's Version link and also SPRINGER 2017.PDF, below) 

Differential privacy is a theoretical framework for ensuring the privacy of individual-level data when performing statistical analysis of privacy-sensitive datasets. This tutorial provides an introduction to and overview of differential privacy, with the goal of conveying its deep connections to a variety of other topics in computational complexity, cryptography, and theoretical computer science at large. This tutorial is written in celebration of Oded Goldreich’s 60th birthday, starting from notes taken during a minicourse given by the author and Kunal Talwar at the 26th McGill Invitational Workshop on Computational Complexity [1].