A Sub Chunk-Confusion Based Privacy Protection Mechanism for Association Rules in Cloud Services

Abstract

In cloud computing services, according to the customized privacy protection policy by the tenant and the sub chunk-confusion based on privacy protection technology, we can partition the tenant’s data into many chunks and confuse the relationships among chunks, which makes the attacker cannot infer tenant’s information by simply combining attributes. But it still has security issues. For example, with the amount of data growing, there may be a few hidden association rules among some attributes of the data chunks. Through these rules, it is possible to get some of the privacy information of the tenant. To address this issue, the paper proposes a privacy protection mechanism based on chunk-confusion privacy protection technology for association rules. The mechanism can detect unidimensional and multidimensional attributes association rules, hide them by adding fake data, re-chunking and re-grouping, and then ensure the privacy of tenant’s data. In addition, this mechanism also provides evaluation formulas. They filter detected association rules, remove the invalid and improve system performance. They also evaluate the effect of privacy protection. The experimental evaluation proves that the mechanism proposed in this paper can better protect the data privacy of tenant and has feasibility and practicality in real world applications.