Secure set intersection cardinality with application to association rule mining

There has been concern over the apparent conflict between privacy and data mining. There is no inherent conflict, as most types of data mining produce summary results that do not reveal information about individuals. The process of data mining may use private data, leading to the potential for privacy breaches. Secure Multiparty Computation shows that results can be produced without revealing the data used to generate them. The problem is that general techniques for secure multiparty computation do not scale to data-mining size computations. This paper presents an efficient protocol for securely determining the size of set intersection, and shows how this can be used to generate association rules where multiple parties have different (and private) information about the same set of individuals.