TY - JOUR AU - Kaissis, Georgios AU - Knolle, Moritz AU - Jungmann, Friederike AU - Ziller, Alexander AU - Usynin, Dmitrii AU - Rueckert, Daniel PY - 2022/07/29 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - A Unified Interpretation of the Gaussian Mechanism for Differential Privacy Through the Sensitivity Index JF - Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality JA - JPC VL - 12 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.29012/jpc.807 UR - https://journalprivacyconfidentiality.org/index.php/jpc/article/view/807 SP - AB - <p>The Gaussian mechanism (GM) represents a universally employed tool for achieving differential privacy (DP), and a large body of work has been devoted to its analysis. We argue that the three prevailing interpretations of the GM, namely epsilon/delta-DP, f-DP and Rényi DP can be expressed by using a single parameter psi, which we term the sensitivity index. Psi uniquely characterises the GM and its properties by encapsulating its two fundamental quantities: the sensitivity of the query and the magnitude of the noise perturbation. With strong links to the ROC curve and the hypothesis-testing interpretation of DP, psi offers the practitioner a powerful method for interpreting, comparing and communicating the privacy guarantees of Gaussian mechanisms.</p> ER -