Privacy refers to the right of individuals to keep their personal information and activities protected from unauthorized access or disclosure. It encompasses various aspects, including information privacy, communication privacy, and personal space.

Posts

Provable Membership Inference Privacy

/in /by

In applications involving sensitive data, such as finance and healthcare, the necessity for preserving data privacy can be a significant barrier to machine learning model development.Differential privacy (DP) has emerged as one canonical standard for provable privacy. However, DP’s strong theoretical guarantees often come at the cost of a large drop in its utility for machine learning; and DP guarantees themselves are difficult to interpret. In this work, we propose a novel privacy notion, membership inference privacy (MIP), as a steptowards addressing these challenges. We give a precise characterization of the relationship between MIP and DP, and show that in some cases, MIP can be achieved using less amountof randomness compared to the amount required for guaranteeing DP, leading to smaller drop in utility. MIP guarantees are also easily interpretable in terms of the success rate of membership inference attacks in a simple random subsampling setting. As a proof of concept, we also provide a simple algorithm for guaranteeing MIP without needing to guarantee DP.

Read more

OpEnCam: Optical Encryption Camera

/in /by

Lensless cameras multiplex the incoming light before it is recorded by the sensor. This ability to multiplex the incoming light has led to the development of ultra-thin, high-speed, and single-shot 3D imagers. Recently, there have been various attempts at demonstrating another useful aspect of lensless cameras – their ability to preserve the privacy of a scene by capturing encrypted measurements. However, existing lensless camera designs suffer numerous inherent privacy vulnerabilities. To demonstrate this, we develop the first comprehensive attack model for encryption cameras, and propose OpEnCam — a novel lensless OPtical ENcryption CAmera design that overcomes these vulnerabilities. OpEnCam encrypts the incoming light before capturing it using the modulating ability of optical masks. Recovery of the original scene from an OpEnCam measurement is possible only if one has access to the camera’s encryption key, defined by the unique optical elements of each camera. Our OpEnCam design introduces two major improvements over existing lensless camera designs – (a) the use of two co-axially located optical masks, one stuck to the sensor and the other a few millimeters above the sensor and (b) the design of mask patterns, which are derived heuristically from signal processing ideas. We show, through experiments, that OpEnCam is robust against a range of attack types while still maintaining the imaging capabilities of existing lensless cameras. We validate the efficacy of OpEnCam using simulated and real data. Finally, we built and tested a prototype in the lab for proof-of-concept.

Read more

LDP-Feat: Image Features with Local Differential Privacy

/in /by

Modern computer vision services often require users to share raw feature descriptors with an untrusted server. This presents an inherent privacy risk, as raw descriptors may be used to recover the source images from which they were extracted. To address this issue, researchers recently proposed privatizing image features by embedding them within an affine subspace containing the original feature as well as adversarial feature samples. In this paper, we propose two novel inversion attacks to show that it is possible to (approximately) recover the original image features from these embeddings, allowing us to recover privacy-critical image content. In light of such successes and the lack of theoretical privacy guarantees afforded by existing visual privacy methods, we further propose the first method to privatize image features via local differential privacy, which, unlike prior approaches, provides a guaranteed bound for privacy leakage regardless of the strength of the attacks. In addition, our method yields strong performance in visual localization as a downstream task while enjoying the privacy guarantee.

Read more

Learning Phase Mask for Privacy-Preserving Passive Depth Estimation

/in /by

With over a billion sold each year, cameras are not only becoming ubiquitous, but are driving progress in a wide range of domains such as mixed reality, robotics, and more. However, severe concerns regarding the privacy implications of camera-based solutions currently limit the range of environments where cameras can be deployed. The key question we address is: Can cameras be enhanced with a scalable solution to preserve users’ privacy without degrading their machine intelligence capabilities? Our solution is a novel end-to-end adversarial learning pipeline in which a phase mask placed at the aperture plane of a camera is jointly optimized with respect to privacy and utility objectives. We conduct an extensive design space analysis to determine operating points with desirable privacy-utility tradeoffs that are also amenable to sensor fabrication and real-world constraints. We demonstrate the first working prototype that enables passive depth estimation while inhibiting face identification.

Read more