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On the cost of differential privacy in distributed control systems

Published: 15 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Individuals sharing information can improve the cost or performance of a distributed control system. But, sharing may also violate privacy. We develop a general framework for studying the cost of differential privacy in systems where a collection of agents, with coupled dynamics, communicate for sensing their shared environment while pursuing individual preferences. First, we propose a communication strategy that relies on adding carefully chosen random noise to agent states and show that it preserves differential privacy. Of course, the higher the standard deviation of the noise, the higher the cost of privacy. For linear distributed control systems with quadratic cost functions, the standard deviation becomes independent of the number agents and it decays with the maximum eigenvalue of the dynamics matrix. Furthermore, for stable dynamics, the noise to be added is independent of the number of agents as well as the time horizon up to which privacy is desired. Finally, we show that the cost of ε-differential privacy up to time T, for a linear stable system with N agents, is upper bounded by O(T32).

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      HiCoNS '14: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on High confidence networked systems
      April 2014
      162 pages
      ISBN:9781450326520
      DOI:10.1145/2566468
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      Published: 15 April 2014

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      Author Tags

      1. cyber-physical security
      2. differential privacy
      3. distributed control

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      HiCoNS '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 18 submissions, 67%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 30 of 55 submissions, 55%

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      • (2024)Privacy-Preserving Cloud Computation of Algebraic Riccati EquationsIEEE Control Systems Letters10.1109/LCSYS.2024.33654188(223-228)Online publication date: 2024
      • (2024)A survey on privacy-preserving control and filtering of networked control systemsInternational Journal of Systems Science10.1080/00207721.2024.234373455:11(2269-2288)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024
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