Maximal α-Leakage and its Properties

Jiachun Liao, Lalitha Sankar, Oliver Kosut, Flávio P. Calmon

Abstract: Maximal α-leakage is a tunable measure of information leakage based on the quality of an adversary's belief about an arbitrary function of private data based on public data. The parameter α determines the loss function used to measure the quality of a belief, ranging from log-loss at α = 1 to the probability of error at α = ∞. We review its definition and main properties, including extensions to α <; 1, robustness to side information, and relationship to Rényi differential privacy.