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SMT-based query tracking for differentially private data analytics systems

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Abstract

Differential privacy enables sensitive data to be analyzed in a privacy-preserving manner. In this paper, we focus on the online setting where each analyst is assigned a privacy budget and queries the data interactively. However, existing differentially private data analytics systems such as PINQ process each query independently, which may cause an unnecessary waste of the privacy budget. Motivated by this, we present a satisfiability modulo theories (SMT)-based query tracking approach to reduce the privacy budget usage. In brief, our approach automatically locates past queries that access disjoint parts of the dataset with respect to the current query to save the privacy cost using the SMT solving techniques. To improve efficiency, we further propose an optimization based on explicitly specified column ranges to facilitate the search process. We have implemented a prototype of our approach with Z3, and conducted several sets of experiments. The results show our approach can save a considerable amount of the privacy budget and each query can be tracked efficiently within milliseconds.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Program on Key Basic Research Project (973 Program) (2010CB328003), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61672310, 61272001, 60903030, 91218302), and the National Key Technologies R&D Program of China (SQ2012BAJY4052).

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Correspondence to Fei He.

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Chen Luo received his BS degree from Tongji University, China in 2013 and his Master’s degree from Tsinghua University, China in 2016. He is currently a PhD student in University of California Irvine, USA. His research interests include formal methods and database systems.

Fei He received his BS degree from the National University of Defense Technology, China in 2002, and the PhD degree from Tsinghua University, China in 2008. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Software at Tsinghua University, China. His research interests include satisfiability, model checking, compositional reasoning, and their applications to embedded systems.

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Luo, C., He, F. SMT-based query tracking for differentially private data analytics systems. Front. Comput. Sci. 12, 1192–1207 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-016-6049-6

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