A Cloud-Based Secure and Privacy-Preserving Clustering Analysis of Infectious Disease

Abstract

The early detection of where and when fatal infectious diseases outbreak is of critical importance to the public health. To effectively detect, analyze and then intervene the spread of diseases, people's health status along with their location information should be timely collected. However, the conventional practices are via surveys or field health workers, which are highly costly and pose serious privacy threats to participants. In this paper, we for the first time propose to exploit the ubiquitous cloud services to collect users' multi-dimensional data in a secure and privacy-preserving manner and to enable the analysis of infectious disease. Specifically, we target at the spatial clustering analysis using Kulldorf scan statistic and propose a key-oblivious inner product encryption (KOIPE) mechanism to ensure that the untrusted entity only obtains the statistic instead of individual's data. Furthermore, we design an anonymous and sybil-resilient approach to protect the data collection process from double registration attacks and meanwhile preserve participant's privacy against untrusted cloud servers. A rigorous and comprehensive security analysis is given to validate our design, and we also conduct extensive simulations based on real-life datasets to demonstrate the performance of our scheme in terms of communication and computing overhead.