Precision-based attacks and interval refining: how to break, then fix, differential privacy on finite computers. (arXiv:2207.13793v1 [cs.CR])

Despite being raised as a problem over ten years ago, the imprecision of
floating point arithmetic continues to cause privacy failures in the
implementations of differentially private noise mechanisms. In this paper, we
highlight a new class of vulnerabilities, which we call \emph{precision-based
attacks}, and which affect several open source libraries. To address this
vulnerability and implement differentially private mechanisms on floating-point
space in a safe way, we propose a novel technique, called \emph{interval
refining}. This technique has minimal error, …

attacks computers differential privacy fix privacy