On the Complexity of Local Distributed Graph Problems

This paper is centered on the complexity of graph problems in the well-studied LOCAL model of distributed computing, introduced by Linial [FOCS '87]. It is widely known that for many of the classic distributed graph problems (including maximal independent set (MIS) and $(\Delta+1)$-vertex coloring), the randomized complexity is at most polylogarithmic in the size $n$ of the network, while the best deterministic complexity is typically $2^{O(\sqrt{\log n})}$. Understanding and narrowing down this exponential gap is considered to be one of the central long-standing open questions in the area of distributed graph algorithms. We investigate the problem by introducing a complexity-theoretic framework that allows us to shed some light on the role of randomness in the LOCAL model. We define the SLOCAL model as a sequential version of the LOCAL model. Our framework allows us to prove completeness results with respect to the class of problems which can be solved efficiently in the SLOCAL model, implying that if any of the complete problems can be solved deterministically in $\log^{O(1)} n$ rounds in the LOCAL model, we can deterministically solve all efficient SLOCAL-problems (including MIS and $(\Delta+1)$-coloring) in $\log^{O(1)} n$ rounds in the LOCAL model. We show that a rather rudimentary looking graph coloring problem is complete in the above sense: Color the nodes of a graph with colors red and blue such that each node of sufficiently large polylogarithmic degree has at least one neighbor of each color. The problem admits a trivial zero-round randomized solution. The result can be viewed as showing that the only obstacle to getting efficient determinstic algorithms in the LOCAL model is an efficient algorithm to approximately round fractional values into integer values

Non-interactive fuzzy private matching

Two fuzzy private matching protocols are introduced to allow a client to securely compare a list of words to a server list, and discover only those words on the server list that are similar to his, while the server learns nothing. The first protocol achieves perfect client security, while the second achieves almostprivacy and perfect server security. Both protocols are efficient in both communication and computation complexity: for lists of length $n$, only $O(n)$ communication and $O(n^2)$ computation is needed

Functionally Private Approximations of Negligibly-Biased Estimators

We study functionally private approximations. An approximation function $g$ is {em functionally private} with respect to $f$ if, for any input $x$, $g(x)$ reveals no more information about $x$ than $f(x)$. Our main result states that a function $f$ admits an efficiently-computable functionally private approximation $g$ if there exists an efficiently-computable and negligibly-biased estimator for $f$. Contrary to previous generic results, our theorem is more general and has a wider application reach.We provide two distinct applications of the above result to demonstrate its flexibility. In the data stream model, we provide a functionally private approximation to the $L_p$-norm estimation problem, a quintessential application in streaming, using only polylogarithmic space in the input size. The privacy guarantees rely on the use of pseudo-random {em functions} (PRF) (a stronger cryptographic notion than pseudo-random generators) of which can be based on common cryptographic assumptions.The application of PRFs in this context appears to be novel and we expect other results to follow suit.Moreover, this is the first known functionally private streaming result for {em any} problem. Our second application result states that every problem in some subclasses of SP of hard counting problems admit efficient and functionally private approximation protocols. This result is based on a functionally private approximation for the SDNF problem (or estimating the number of satisfiable truth assignments to a Boolean formula in disjunctive normal form), which is an application of our main theorem and previously known results

The Geometry of Differential Privacy: the Sparse and Approximate Cases

In this work, we study trade-offs between accuracy and privacy in the context of linear queries over histograms. This is a rich class of queries that includes contingency tables and range queries, and has been a focus of a long line of work. For a set of $d$ linear queries over a database $x \in \R^N$, we seek to find the differentially private mechanism that has the minimum mean squared error. For pure differential privacy, an $O(\log^2 d)$ approximation to the optimal mechanism is known. Our first contribution is to give an $O(\log^2 d)$ approximation guarantee for the case of (\eps,\delta)-differential privacy. Our mechanism is simple, efficient and adds correlated Gaussian noise to the answers. We prove its approximation guarantee relative to the hereditary discrepancy lower bound of Muthukrishnan and Nikolov, using tools from convex geometry. We next consider this question in the case when the number of queries exceeds the number of individuals in the database, i.e. when $d > n \triangleq \|x\|_1$. It is known that better mechanisms exist in this setting. Our second main contribution is to give an (\eps,\delta)-differentially private mechanism which is optimal up to a \polylog(d,N) factor for any given query set $A$ and any given upper bound $n$ on $\|x\|_1$. This approximation is achieved by coupling the Gaussian noise addition approach with a linear regression step. We give an analogous result for the \eps-differential privacy setting. We also improve on the mean squared error upper bound for answering counting queries on a database of size $n$ by Blum, Ligett, and Roth, and match the lower bound implied by the work of Dinur and Nissim up to logarithmic factors. The connection between hereditary discrepancy and the privacy mechanism enables us to derive the first polylogarithmic approximation to the hereditary discrepancy of a matrix $A$

Computing Real Roots of Real Polynomials ... and now For Real!

Very recent work introduces an asymptotically fast subdivision algorithm, denoted ANewDsc, for isolating the real roots of a univariate real polynomial. The method combines Descartes' Rule of Signs to test intervals for the existence of roots, Newton iteration to speed up convergence against clusters of roots, and approximate computation to decrease the required precision. It achieves record bounds on the worst-case complexity for the considered problem, matching the complexity of Pan's method for computing all complex roots and improving upon the complexity of other subdivision methods by several magnitudes. In the article at hand, we report on an implementation of ANewDsc on top of the RS root isolator. RS is a highly efficient realization of the classical Descartes method and currently serves as the default real root solver in Maple. We describe crucial design changes within ANewDsc and RS that led to a high-performance implementation without harming the theoretical complexity of the underlying algorithm. With an excerpt of our extensive collection of benchmarks, available online at http://anewdsc.mpi-inf.mpg.de/, we illustrate that the theoretical gain in performance of ANewDsc over other subdivision methods also transfers into practice. These experiments also show that our new implementation outperforms both RS and mature competitors by magnitudes for notoriously hard instances with clustered roots. For all other instances, we avoid almost any overhead by integrating additional optimizations and heuristics.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the 41st International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC), July 19--22, 2016, Waterloo, Ontario, Canad

Streaming Verification of Graph Properties

Streaming interactive proofs (SIPs) are a framework for outsourced computation. A computationally limited streaming client (the verifier) hands over a large data set to an untrusted server (the prover) in the cloud and the two parties run a protocol to confirm the correctness of result with high probability. SIPs are particularly interesting for problems that are hard to solve (or even approximate) well in a streaming setting. The most notable of these problems is finding maximum matchings, which has received intense interest in recent years but has strong lower bounds even for constant factor approximations. In this paper, we present efficient streaming interactive proofs that can verify maximum matchings exactly. Our results cover all flavors of matchings (bipartite/non-bipartite and weighted). In addition, we also present streaming verifiers for approximate metric TSP. In particular, these are the first efficient results for weighted matchings and for metric TSP in any streaming verification model.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figure, 1 tabl

Communication Complexity and Secure Function Evaluation

We suggest two new methodologies for the design of efficient secure protocols, that differ with respect to their underlying computational models. In one methodology we utilize the communication complexity tree (or branching for f and transform it into a secure protocol. In other words, "any function f that can be computed using communication complexity c can be can be computed securely using communication complexity that is polynomial in c and a security parameter". The second methodology uses the circuit computing f, enhanced with look-up tables as its underlying computational model. It is possible to simulate any RAM machine in this model with polylogarithmic blowup. Hence it is possible to start with a computation of f on a RAM machine and transform it into a secure protocol. We show many applications of these new methodologies resulting in protocols efficient either in communication or in computation. In particular, we exemplify a protocol for the "millionaires problem", where two participants want to compare their values but reveal no other information. Our protocol is more efficient than previously known ones in either communication or computation

Theoretically Efficient Parallel Graph Algorithms Can Be Fast and Scalable

There has been significant recent interest in parallel graph processing due to the need to quickly analyze the large graphs available today. Many graph codes have been designed for distributed memory or external memory. However, today even the largest publicly-available real-world graph (the Hyperlink Web graph with over 3.5 billion vertices and 128 billion edges) can fit in the memory of a single commodity multicore server. Nevertheless, most experimental work in the literature report results on much smaller graphs, and the ones for the Hyperlink graph use distributed or external memory. Therefore, it is natural to ask whether we can efficiently solve a broad class of graph problems on this graph in memory. This paper shows that theoretically-efficient parallel graph algorithms can scale to the largest publicly-available graphs using a single machine with a terabyte of RAM, processing them in minutes. We give implementations of theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms for 20 important graph problems. We also present the optimizations and techniques that we used in our implementations, which were crucial in enabling us to process these large graphs quickly. We show that the running times of our implementations outperform existing state-of-the-art implementations on the largest real-world graphs. For many of the problems that we consider, this is the first time they have been solved on graphs at this scale. We have made the implementations developed in this work publicly-available as the Graph-Based Benchmark Suite (GBBS).Comment: This is the full version of the paper appearing in the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), 201