Sharp error terms for return time statistics under mixing conditions

We describe the statistics of repetition times of a string of symbols in a stochastic process. Denote by T(A) the time elapsed until the process spells the finite string A and by S(A) the number of consecutive repetitions of A. We prove that, if the length of the string grows unbondedly, (1) the distribution of T(A), when the process starts with A, is well aproximated by a certain mixture of the point measure at the origin and an exponential law, and (2) S(A) is approximately geometrically distributed. We provide sharp error terms for each of these approximations. The errors we obtain are point-wise and allow to get also approximations for all the moments of T(A) and S(A). To obtain (1) we assume that the process is phi-mixing while to obtain (2) we assume the convergence of certain contidional probabilities

Exponential distribution for the occurrence of rare patterns in Gibbsian random fields

We study the distribution of the occurrence of rare patterns in sufficiently mixing Gibbs random fields on the lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$, $d\geq 2$. A typical example is the high temperature Ising model. This distribution is shown to converge to an exponential law as the size of the pattern diverges. Our analysis not only provides this convergence but also establishes a precise estimate of the distance between the exponential law and the distribution of the occurrence of finite patterns. A similar result holds for the repetition of a rare pattern. We apply these results to the fluctuation properties of occurrence and repetition of patterns: We prove a central limit theorem and a large deviation principle.Comment: To appear in Commun. Math. Phy

Relating two standard notions of secrecy

Two styles of definitions are usually considered to express that a security protocol preserves the confidentiality of a data s. Reachability-based secrecy means that s should never be disclosed while equivalence-based secrecy states that two executions of a protocol with distinct instances for s should be indistinguishable to an attacker. Although the second formulation ensures a higher level of security and is closer to cryptographic notions of secrecy, decidability results and automatic tools have mainly focused on the first definition so far. This paper initiates a systematic investigation of the situations where syntactic secrecy entails strong secrecy. We show that in the passive case, reachability-based secrecy actually implies equivalence-based secrecy for digital signatures, symmetric and asymmetric encryption provided that the primitives are probabilistic. For active adversaries, we provide sufficient (and rather tight) conditions on the protocol for this implication to hold.Comment: 29 pages, published in LMC

Return times for Stochastic processes with power-law scaling

An analytical study of the return time distribution of extreme events for stochastic processes with power-law correlation has been carried on. The calculation is based on an epsilon-expansion in the correlation exponent: C(t)=|t|^{-1+epsilon}. The fixed point of the theory is associated with stretched exponential scaling of the distribution; analytical expressions, valid in the pre-asymptotic regime, have been provided. Also the permanence time distribution appears to be characterized by stretched exponential scaling. The conditions for application of the theory to non-Gaussian processes have been analyzed and the relations with the issue of return times in the case of multifractal measures have been discussed.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, revtex

Prochlo: Strong Privacy for Analytics in the Crowd

The large-scale monitoring of computer users' software activities has become commonplace, e.g., for application telemetry, error reporting, or demographic profiling. This paper describes a principled systems architecture---Encode, Shuffle, Analyze (ESA)---for performing such monitoring with high utility while also protecting user privacy. The ESA design, and its Prochlo implementation, are informed by our practical experiences with an existing, large deployment of privacy-preserving software monitoring. (cont.; see the paper