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Welcome to the fourth issue of the JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN INFORMATION THEORY (JSAIT), dedicated to “Privacy and Security of Information Systems.”

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name.

We investigate the problem of multi-party private set intersection (MP-PSI). In MP-PSI, there are M parties, each storing a data set Pi over Ni replicated and non-colluding databases, and we want to calculate the intersection of the data sets ∩i=1MPi without leaking any information beyond the set intersection to any of the parties. We consider a specific communication protocol where one of the parties, called the leader party, initiates the MP-PSI protocol by sending queries to the remaining parties which are called client parties.

A private information retrieval (PIR) protocol guarantees that a user can privately retrieve files stored in a database without revealing any information about the identity of the requested file. Existing information-theoretic PIR protocols ensure perfect privacy, i.e., zero information leakage to the servers storing the database, but at the cost of high download. In this work, we present weakly-private information retrieval (WPIR) schemes that trade off perfect privacy to improve the download cost when the database is stored on a single server.

We study the relationship between randomized low influence functions and differentially private mechanisms. Our main aim is to formally determine whether differentially private mechanisms are low influence and whether low influence randomized functions can be differentially private. We show that differential privacy does not necessarily imply low influence in a formal sense. However, low influence implies approximate differential privacy.

A distributed computing scenario is considered, where the computational power of a set of worker nodes is used to perform a certain computation task over a dataset that is dispersed among the workers. Lagrange coded computing (LCC), proposed by Yu et al., leverages the well-known Lagrange polynomial to perform polynomial evaluation of the dataset in such a scenario in an efficient parallel fashion while keeping the privacy of data amidst possible collusion of workers.