OpenDP Attacks Working Group
Data privacy is a growing concern for data stewards and system developers who wish to share data with analysts while protecting the privacy of individuals represented in datasets. However, it is often unclear what protections are needed to safeguard data subjects’ sensitive information.
To build state-of-the-art privacy systems, it is important to first understand the scope of relevant privacy threats and attacks. However, the academic literature outlining privacy attacks is massive and ever-growing. Real-world attacks are just as numerous and complex. For data curators, developers, and practitioners attempting to understand what attacks are relevant to a particular use-case, it is extremely difficult to wade through the literature and pinpoint the different nuances of each threat model and attack.
This is one of the main concerns that came up during the 2023 OpenDP Community meeting, and one that the OpenDP Attacks Working Group has aimed to address. Over the last two years, we have done a deep dive into the academic literature on privacy attacks and met with various stakeholders about what resources would be most helpful to the community.
We are excited to announce the launch of the “OpenDP Community Guide to Output Privacy Attacks,” a catalog of scientific papers on output privacy attacks in the academic literature. The repository classifies papers according to various salient dimensions such as the adversarial threat model and success metrics used to evaluate the attack. Users can filter for papers that meet various criteria across these dimensions. So far, over 80 papers have been submitted to the repository.
This repository is an open resource by the community, for the community. We welcome submissions of papers. See here for instructions on how to contribute.
If you’d like to hear more about the working group’s efforts in developing the repository, please check out Tudor Cebere’s presentation at the 2025 OpenDP Community Meeting. We look forward to seeing the repository grow and evolve along with our community.