Static Partial Order Reduction for Probabilistic Systems

December 12, 2011

Álvaro Fernández


Static Partial Order Reduction for Probabilistic Systems

Time:   11:00am
Location:   Meeting room 302 (Mountain View), level 3

Differential privacy is a notion of confidentiality that protects the privacy of individuals while allowing useful computations on their private data. Deriving differential privacy guarantees for real programs is a difficult and error-prone task that calls for principled approaches and tool support. Approaches based on linear types and static analysis have recently emerged; however, an increasing number of programs achieve privacy using techniques that cannot be analyzed by these approaches. Examples include programs that aim for weaker, approximate differential privacy guarantees, programs that use the Exponential mechanism, and randomized programs that achieve differential privacy without using any standard mechanism. Providing support for reasoning about the privacy of such programs has been an open problem.

In this talk we will present CertiPriv, a machine-checked framework that relies on a (quantitative) probabilistic relational Hoare logic to reason about differential privacy.