Privacy-preserving association rule mining based on electronic medical system

Privacy protection during collaborative distributed association rule mining is an important research, which has been widely used in market prediction, medical research and other fields. In medical research, Domadiya et al. (Sadhana 43(8):127, 2018) focused on mining association rules from horizontally distributed healthcare data to diagnose heart disease. They claimed they proposed a more effective privacy-preserving distributed association rule mining (PPDARM) scheme. However, a serious security scrutiny of the scheme is performed, and we find it vulnerable to protect the support of the itemsets from any electronic health record (EHR) system, which is the most important parameter Domadiya et al. tried to protect. In this paper, we first present the cryptanalysis of the PPDARM scheme proposed by Domadiya et al. as well as some revised performance analyses. Then a new PPDARM scheme with less interactions is proposed to avert the shortcomings of Domadiya et al., using the homomorphic properties of the distributed Paillier cryptosystem to accomplish the cooperative computation. Our scheme allows the directed authority (miner) to obtain the final results rather than all cooperative EHR systems, in case of semi-honest but pseudo EHR systems. Moreover, security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate our proposal is efficient and feasible.