论文标题
可证明的私人分布平均共识:一种信息理论方法
Provably Private Distributed Averaging Consensus: An Information-Theoretic Approach
论文作者
论文摘要
在这项工作中,我们专注于以私人方式解决分散的共识问题。具体而言,我们考虑了一个设置,其中一组通过网络连接的节点旨在计算其本地值的平均值而不彼此揭示这些值。分布式共识问题是一个经过广泛研究的经典问题,其收敛特征是众所周知的。 las,最新的共识方法建立在与相邻节点交换本地信息的想法上,从而泄露了有关用户本地值的信息。我们提出了一个算法框架,能够实现经典共识算法的收敛限制和速率,同时使用户的本地价值私有。我们提出的方法的关键思想是仔细设计从每个节点传递给其邻居的嘈杂消息,以使共识算法仍然准确地收敛到本地值的平均值,而有关本地值的最小信息却泄漏了。我们通过精确表征节点的私人消息与另一个对手会随着时间收集的所有消息之间的相互信息来形式化这一点。我们证明,我们的方法能够在没有所谓的“广义叶子”的情况下保护用户对任何网络的隐私,并在隐私和收敛时间之间进行正式的权衡。与许多私人算法不同,我们的方法都可以实现任何所需的准确性,而所需的隐私水平只会影响收敛时间。
In this work, we focus on solving a decentralized consensus problem in a private manner. Specifically, we consider a setting in which a group of nodes, connected through a network, aim at computing the mean of their local values without revealing those values to each other. The distributed consensus problem is a classic problem that has been extensively studied and its convergence characteristics are well-known. Alas, state-of-the-art consensus methods build on the idea of exchanging local information with neighboring nodes which leaks information about the users' local values. We propose an algorithmic framework that is capable of achieving the convergence limit and rate of classic consensus algorithms while keeping the users' local values private. The key idea of our proposed method is to carefully design noisy messages that are passed from each node to its neighbors such that the consensus algorithm still converges precisely to the average of local values, while a minimum amount of information about local values is leaked. We formalize this by precisely characterizing the mutual information between the private message of a node and all the messages that another adversary collects over time. We prove that our method is capable of preserving users' privacy for any network without a so-called "generalized leaf", and formalize the trade-off between privacy and convergence time. Unlike many private algorithms, any desired accuracy is achievable by our method, and the required level of privacy only affects the convergence time.