Exploring differential obliviousness

Amos Beimel, Kobbi Nissim, Mohammad Zaheri

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In a recent paper, Chan et al. [SODA’19] proposed a relaxation of the notion of (full) memory obliviousness, which was introduced by Goldreich and Ostrovsky [J. ACM’96] and extensively researched by cryptographers. The new notion, differential obliviousness, requires that any two neighboring inputs exhibit similar memory access patterns, where the similarity requirement is that of differential privacy. Chan et al. demonstrated that differential obliviousness allows achieving improved efficiency for several algorithmic tasks, including sorting, merging of sorted lists, and range query data structures. In this work, we continue the exploration of differential obliviousness, focusing on algorithms that do not necessarily examine all their input. This choice is motivated by the fact that the existence of logarithmic overhead ORAM protocols implies that differential obliviousness can yield at most a logarithmic improvement in efficiency for computations that need to examine all their input. In particular, we explore property testing, where we show that differential obliviousness yields an almost linear improvement in overhead in the dense graph model, and at most quadratic improvement in the bounded degree model. We also explore tasks where a non-oblivious algorithm would need to explore different portions of the input, where the latter would depend on the input itself, and where we show that such a behavior can be maintained under differential obliviousness, but not under full obliviousness. Our examples suggest that there would be benefits in further exploring which class of computational tasks are amenable to differential obliviousness.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationApproximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques, APPROX/RANDOM 2019
EditorsDimitris Achlioptas, Laszlo A. Vegh
PublisherSchloss Dagstuhl- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing
ISBN (Electronic)9783959771252
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Sep 2019
Event22nd International Conference on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems and 23rd International Conference on Randomization and Computation, APPROX/RANDOM 2019 - Cambridge, United States
Duration: 20 Sep 201922 Sep 2019

Publication series

NameLeibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs
Volume145

Conference

Conference22nd International Conference on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems and 23rd International Conference on Randomization and Computation, APPROX/RANDOM 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCambridge
Period20/09/1922/09/19

Keywords

  • Differential Obliviousness
  • Differential Privacy
  • Graph Property Testing
  • Oblivious RAM

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software

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