Privacy Amplification via Shuffling: Unified, Simplified, and Tightened

In decentralized settings, the shuffle model of differential privacy has emerged as a promising alternative to the classical local model. Analyzing privacy amplification via shuffling is a critical component in both single-message and multi-message shuffle protocols. However, current methods used in these two areas are distinct and specific, making them less convenient for protocol designers and practitioners. In this work, we introduce variation-ratio reduction as a unified framework for privacy amplification analyses in the shuffle model. This framework utilizes total variation bounds of local messages and probability ratio bounds of other users' blanket messages, converting them to indistinguishable levels. Our results indicate that the framework yields tighter bounds for both single-message and multi-message encoders (e.g., with local DP, local metric DP, or general multi-message randomizers). Specifically, for a broad range of local randomizers having extremal probability design, our amplification bounds are precisely tight. We also demonstrate that variation-ratio reduction is well-suited for parallel composition in the shuffle model and results in stricter privacy accounting for common sampling-based local randomizers. Our experimental findings show that, compared to existing amplification bounds, our numerical amplification bounds can save up to $30\%$ of the budget for single-message protocols, $75\%$ of the budget for multi-message protocols, and $75\%$-$95\%$ of the budget for parallel composition. Additionally, our implementation for numerical amplification bounds has only $\tilde{O}(n)$ complexity and is highly efficient in practice, taking just $2$ minutes for $n=10^8$ users. The code for our implementation can be found at \url{https://github.com/wangsw/PrivacyAmplification}.