Abstract

Record linkage allows data from different sources to be integrated to facilitate data mining tasks. However, in many cases, records have to be linked by personally identifiable information. To prevent privacy breaches, ideally records should be linked in a private way such that no information other than the matching result is leaked in the process. One approach for Private Record Linkage (PRL) is by using cryptographic protocols. In this talk, I will introduce Private Set Intersection (PSI), which is a type of cryptographic protocol that enables two parties to obtain the intersection of their private sets. It is almost trivial to build an exact PRL protocol from a PSI protocol. With more efforts, it is also possible to build an approximate PRL protocol from PSI that allows linking records based on certain similarity metrics. In this talk, I will present efficient PSI protocols, and how to obtain PRL protocols that are practically efficient and effective.