Necessary Conditions in Multi-Server Differential Privacy

We consider protocols where users communicate with multiple servers to perform a computation on the users' data. An adversary exerts semi-honest control over many of the parties but its view is differentially private with respect to honest users. Prior work described protocols that required multiple rounds of interaction or offered privacy against a computationally bounded adversary. Our work presents limitations of non-interactive protocols that offer privacy against unbounded adversaries. We show these protocols demand exponentially more samples for some learning and estimation tasks than centrally private counterparts. This means performing as well as the central model requires interactivity or computational differential privacy, or both.
Comment: 22 pages