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Information Density Bounds for Privacy
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Information Science and Engineering. Inria Saclay, Palaiseau, France.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6908-559x
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Information Science and Engineering.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7192-8418
University of New South Wales, School of Engineering and Technology, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Information Science and Engineering.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7926-5081
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2026 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, ISSN 0018-9448, E-ISSN 1557-9654, Vol. 72, no 1, p. 610-635Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This paper explores the implications of guaranteeing privacy by imposing a lower bound on the information density between the private and the public data. We introduce a novel and operationally meaningful privacy measure called pointwise maximal cost (PMC) and demonstrate that imposing an upper bound on PMC is equivalent to enforcing a lower bound on the information density. PMC quantifies the information leakage about a secret to adversaries who aim to minimize non-negative cost functions after observing the outcome of a privacy mechanism. When restricted to finite alphabets, PMC can equivalently be defined as the information leakage to adversaries aiming to minimize the probability of incorrectly guessing randomized functions of the secret. We study the properties of PMC and apply it to standard privacy mechanisms to demonstrate its practical relevance. Through a detailed examination, we connect PMC with other privacy measures that impose upper or lower bounds on the information density. These are pointwise maximal leakage (PML), local differential privacy (LDP), and (asymmetric) local information privacy. In particular, we show that a mechanism satisfies LDP if and only if it has both bounded PMC and bounded PML. Overall, our work fills a conceptual and operational gap in the taxonomy of privacy measures, bridges existing disconnects between different frameworks, and offers insights for selecting a suitable notion of privacy in a given application.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2026. Vol. 72, no 1, p. 610-635
Keywords [en]
cost function, gain function, information density, information privacy, local differential privacy, pointwise maximal cost, pointwise maximal leakage, Privacy
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-374011DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2025.3637364ISI: 001650238500020Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105023122234OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-374011DiVA, id: diva2:2021559
Note

QC 20260127

Available from: 2025-12-15 Created: 2025-12-15 Last updated: 2026-01-27Bibliographically approved

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Saeidian, SaraGrosse, LeonhardSkoglund, MikaelOechtering, Tobias J.

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