Secure Mining of Association Rules in Horizontally Distributed Databases

We propose a protocol for secure mining of association rules in horizontally distributed databases. The current leading protocol is that of Kantarcioglu and Clifton . Our protocol, like theirs, is based on the Fast Distributed Mining (FDM)algorithm of Cheung et al. , which is an unsecured distributed version of the Apriori algorithm. The main ingredients in our protocol are two novel secure multi-party algorithms-one that computes the union of private subsets that each of the interacting players hold, and another that tests the inclusion of an element held by one player in a subset held by another. Our protocol offers enhanced privacy with respect to the protocol in . In addition, it is simpler and is significantly more efficient in terms of communication rounds, communication cost and computational cost.