Differentially Private Distance Query with Asymmetric Noise

Abstract: With the growth of online social services, social information graphs are becoming increasingly complex. Privacy issues related to analyzing or publishing on social graphs are also becoming increasingly serious. Since the shortest paths play an important role in graphs, privately publishing the shortest paths or distances has attracted the attention of researchers. Differential privacy (DP) is an excellent standard for preserving privacy. However, existing works to answer the distance query with the guarantee of DP were almost based on the weight private graph assumption, not on the paths themselves. In this paper, we consider edges as privacy and propose distance publishing mechanisms based on edge DP. To address the issue of utility damage caused by large global sensitivities, we revisit studies related to asymmetric neighborhoods in DP with the observation that the distance query is monotonic in asymmetric neighborhoods. We formally give the definition of asymmetric neighborhoods and propose Individual Asymmetric Differential Privacy with higher privacy guarantees in combination with smooth sensitivity. Then, we introduce two methods to efficiently compute the smooth sensitivity of distance queries in asymmetric neighborhoods. Finally, we validate our scheme using both real-world and synthetic datasets, which can reduce the error to $0.0862$.