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Differential privacy can be used to show that the "privacy loss" of a certain computation is "bounded" in a meaningful way. In cryptography, often "indistinguishability" is considered, i.e. we want $\Delta(D_0, D_1)$ to be small. Can these two concepts be related?

I know vaguely that standard notions of differential privacy can be related to things like "concentrated differential privacy", which itself is a Renyi-type bound on two distributions (which is somewhat similar to the total variation distance bound that I want). But I want to end my proof with "So, the two distributions are indistinguishable" --- can differential privacy help me with this goal?

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  • $\begingroup$ Can you specify the "renyi type" bound you're talking about. A quick look at Dwork's paper shows bounds depending on subgaussian properties. $\endgroup$
    – kodlu
    Mar 16, 2021 at 1:08
  • $\begingroup$ @kodlu Later papers by Bun and Steinke recast things in terms of Renyi-divergences I think. I'm mostly going on information from this paper. $\endgroup$
    – Mark
    Mar 16, 2021 at 1:33

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These sorts of arguments come up in the theory of randomness extractors where we argue that a random function from a certain family when applied to inputs with a certain minimum entropy ($H_\infty$, the -ve log-maximum probability of an outcome in the Renyi notation) produce outputs that are indistinguishable from uniform up to some $\epsilon$ bound. The differential privacy of the uniform and extractor distributions can be bounded in terms of input size, output size and $H_\infty$ (see for example the Kamp and Zuckerman theorem of the article).

The min-entropy should be the choice of entropy function when using differential privacy as it bounds the worst case scenario of concentration of inputs.

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