Challenging differential privacy:the case of non-interactive mechanisms

Abstract

In this paper, we consider personalized recommendation systems in which before publication, the profile of a user is sanitized by a non-interactive mechanism compliant with the concept of differential privacy. We consider two existing schemes offering a differentially private representation of profiles: BLIP (BLoom-and-flIP) and JLT (Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform). For assessing their security levels, we play the role of an adversary aiming at reconstructing a user profile. We compare two inference attacks, namely single and joint decoding. The first one decides of the presence of a single item in the profile, and sequentially explores all the item set. The latter strategy decides whether a subset of items is likely to be the user profile, and considers all the possible subsets. Our contributions are a theoretical analysis as well as a practical implementation of both attacks, which were evaluated on datasets of real user profiles. The results obtained clearly demonstrates that joint decoding is the most powerful attack, while also giving useful insights on how to set the differential privacy parameter ε. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.