DP protects an individuals privacy even against a computationally
unbounded adversary. In the mid 2000’s, Salil Vadhan and Mark Bun asked
- “Is there a computational task solvable by a single curator with
computational differential privacy but is impossible to achieve with
information-theoretic differential privacy?”. In other words, is
there any benefit to reducing the power of adversary to being polynomial
time. In cryptography there are enormous benefits to assuming one-way
functions exist. We get commitment schemes, digitial signatures which
are fundamental to how we use crypto in society. However, [GKY11]
showed that for all the typical tasks for which we use DP, like
publishing aggregate statistics, there is no benefit to assuming weaker
adversaries. This problem has remained open for a while, till two groups
independently proposed two different solutions.
In recent work, we were able to identify a separation. Concurrently,
a group at Google identified a separation using completely
different techniques.
Working Paper
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