A private information retrieval (PIR) protocol guarantees that a user can privately retrieve files stored in a database without revealing any information about the identity of the requested file. Existing information-theoretic PIR protocols ensure perfect privacy, i.e., zero information leakage to the servers storing the database, but at the cost of high download. In this work, we present weakly-private information retrieval (WPIR) schemes that trade off perfect privacy to improve the download cost when the database is stored on a single server.

We study the relationship between randomized low influence functions and differentially private mechanisms. Our main aim is to formally determine whether differentially private mechanisms are low influence and whether low influence randomized functions can be differentially private. We show that differential privacy does not necessarily imply low influence in a formal sense. However, low influence implies approximate differential privacy.

A distributed computing scenario is considered, where the computational power of a set of worker nodes is used to perform a certain computation task over a dataset that is dispersed among the workers. Lagrange coded computing (LCC), proposed by Yu et al., leverages the well-known Lagrange polynomial to perform polynomial evaluation of the dataset in such a scenario in an efficient parallel fashion while keeping the privacy of data amidst possible collusion of workers.

We consider a distributed empirical risk minimization (ERM) optimization problem with communication efficiency and privacy requirements, motivated by the federated learning (FL) framework (Kairouz et al., 2019).

The graph matching problem emerges naturally in various applications such as Web privacy, image processing and computational biology. In this article, graph matching is considered under a stochastic model, where a pair of randomly generated graphs with pairwise correlated edges are to be matched such that given the labeling of the vertices in the first graph, the labels in the second graph are recovered by leveraging the correlation among their edges. The problem is considered under various settings and graph models.

Motivated by applications to covert quantum radar, we analyze a covert quantum sensing problem, in which a legitimate user aims at estimating an unknown parameter taking finitely many values by probing a quantum channel while remaining undetectable from an adversary receiving the probing signals through another quantum channel. When channels are classical-quantum, we characterize the optimal error exponent under a covertness constraint for sensing strategies in which probing signals do not depend on past observations.

The relationships among secrecy, compression rate and shared secret key rate in lossless data compression are studied through the lenses of perfect secrecy, mutual information leakage, maximal leakage, local differential privacy, and secrecy by design. It is revealed that the utility cost of jointly compressing and securing data is very sensitive to the adopted secrecy metric and the specifics of the compression setting.

The growing size of modern datasets necessitates splitting a large scale computation into smaller computations and operate in a distributed manner. Adversaries in a distributed system deliberately send erroneous data in order to affect the computation for their benefit. Boolean functions are the key components of many applications, e.g., verification functions in blockchain systems and design of cryptographic algorithms.

Cloud computing platforms have created the possibility for computationally limited users to delegate demanding tasks to strong but untrusted servers. Verifiable computing algorithms help build trust in such interactions by enabling the server to provide a proof of correctness of his results which the user can check very efficiently. In this article, we present a doubly-efficient interactive algorithm for verifiable polynomial evaluation.

Establishing code equivalences between index coding and network coding provides important insights for code design. Previous works showed an equivalence relation between any index-coding instance and a network-coding instance, for which a code for one instance can be translated to a code for the other instance with the same decoding-error performance. The equivalence also showed a surprising result that any network-coding instance can be mapped to an index-coding instance with a properly designed code translation.