Verifiable Privacy-Preserving Outsourced Frequent Itemset Mining on Vertically Partitioned Databases

In the data era, to simultaneously relieve the heavy computational burden of mining data information from data owners and protecting data privacy, privacy-preserving frequent itemset mining (PPFIM) is presented and has attracted much attention. In PPFIM, data owners and miners outsource the complex task of data mining to the cloud server, which supports strong storage and computing power, and the cloud server cannot extract additional data privacy other than that which is shown by data owners or miners. However, most existing solutions assume that cloud servers will honestly perform the mining process and return the correct results, whereas cloud services are usually provided by a charging third party that may in practice return incorrect results due to computation errors, malicious or criminal activities, etc. To solve this problem, in this paper, we present a verifiable PPFIM protocol on vertically partitioned databases to support the verifiability of the integrity of the mining results, where data owners can authorize the cloud server to perform federated mining on vertically partitioned databases without leaking data information and detect dishonest behaviors in the cloud server from the returned results. We adopt a dual cloud setting to enable data owners to be offline after uploading their encrypted databases to the cloud server, which further relieves the burden on data owners. We implement our protocol and give a detailed analysis in terms of verification accuracy, which shows that the dishonest behaviors of the cloud server can be detected with a probability close to 1 and a sacrifice of only a 1% increase in database size.