English

Bistochastic privacy

Cryptography and Security 2022-07-11 v1

Abstract

We introduce a new privacy model relying on bistochastic matrices, that is, matrices whose components are nonnegative and sum to 1 both row-wise and column-wise. This class of matrices is used to both define privacy guarantees and a tool to apply protection on a data set. The bistochasticity assumption happens to connect several fields of the privacy literature, including the two most popular models, k-anonymity and differential privacy. Moreover, it establishes a bridge with information theory, which simplifies the thorny issue of evaluating the utility of a protected data set. Bistochastic privacy also clarifies the trade-off between protection and utility by using bits, which can be viewed as a natural currency to comprehend and operationalize this trade-off, in the same way than bits are used in information theory to capture uncertainty. A discussion on the suitable parameterization of bistochastic matrices to achieve the privacy guarantees of this new model is also provided.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.03940,
  title  = {Bistochastic privacy},
  author = {Nicolas Ruiz and Josep Domingo-Ferrer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.03940},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

To be published in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence vol 13408, Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence 19th International Conference MDAI 2022, Sant Cugat, Catalonia, August 30 - 2 September 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-25T00:45:32.577Z