In this paper a homomorphic privacy preserving association rule mining
algorithm is proposed which can be deployed in resource constrained devices
(RCD). Privacy preserved exchange of counts of itemsets among distributed
mining sites is a vital part in association rule mining process. Existing
cryptography based privacy preserving solutions consume lot of computation due
to complex mathematical equations involved. Therefore less computation involved
privacy solutions are extremely necessary to deploy mining applications in RCD.
In this algorithm, a semi-trusted mixer is used to unify the counts of itemsets
encrypted by all mining sites without revealing individual values. The proposed
algorithm is built on with a well known communication efficient association
rule mining algorithm named count distribution (CD). Security proofs along with
performance analysis and comparison show the well acceptability and
effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Efficient and straightforward privacy
model and satisfactory performance of the protocol promote itself among one of
the initiatives in deploying data mining application in RCD.Comment: IEEE Publication format, International Journal of Computer Science
and Information Security, IJCSIS, Vol. 8 No. 1, April 2010, USA. ISSN 1947
5500, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis