Adding controlled noise from predetermined distributions is a way of designing differentially private mechanisms. This technique is useful for designing private mechanisms for real-valued functions on sensitive data. Some commonly used distributions for adding noise include Laplace and Gaussian distributions.

Definitions 
Let  be a collection of all datasets and  be a real-valued function. The sensitivity  of a function, denoted , is defined by

 

where the maximum is over all pairs of datasets  and  in  differing in at most one element. For functions with higher dimensions, the sensitivity is usually measured under  or  norms.

Throughout this article,  is used to denote a randomized algorithm that releases a sensitive function  under the - (or -) differential privacy.

Mechanisms for Real-Valued Functions

Laplace Mechanism 
Introduced by Dwork et al., this mechanism adds noise drawn from a Laplace distribution:

 

where  is the expectation of the Laplace distribution and  is the scale parameter. Roughly speaking, a small-scale noise should suffice for a weak privacy constraint (corresponding to a large value of ), while a greater level of noise would provide a greater degree of uncertainty in what was the original input (corresponding to a small value of ).

To argue that the mechanism satisfies -differential privacy, it suffices to show that the output distribution of  is close in a multiplicative sense to  everywhere. The first inequality follows from the triangle inequality and the second from the sensitivity bound. A similar argument gives a lower bound of .

A discrete variant of the Laplace mechanism, called the geometric mechanism, is universally utility-maximizing. It means that for any prior (such as auxiliary information or beliefs about data distributions) and any symmetric and monotone univariate loss function, the expected loss of any differentially private mechanism can be matched or improved by running the geometric mechanism followed by a data-independent post-processing transformation. The result also holds for minimax (risk-averse) consumers. No such universal mechanism exists for multi-variate loss functions.

Gaussian Mechanism 
Analogous to Laplace mechanism, Gaussian mechanism adds noise drawn from a Gaussian distribution whose variance is calibrated according to the sensitivity and privacy parameters. For any  and , the mechanism defined by:

provides -differential privacy.

Note that, unlike Laplace mechanism,  only satisfies -differential privacy with . To prove so, it is sufficient to show that, with probability at least , the distribution of  is close to . See Appendix A in Dwork and Roth for a proof of this result).

Mechanisms for High Dimensional Functions 
For high dimensional functions of the form , where , the sensitivity of  is measured under   or  norms. The equivalent Gaussian mechanism that satisfies -differential privacy for such function (still under the assumption that ) is

where  represents the sensitivity of  under  norm and  represents a -dimensional vector, where each coordinate is a noise sampled according to  independent of the other coordinates (see Appendix A in Dwork and Roth for proof).

References 

Differential privacy
Information privacy