3rd International ICST Symposium on Information Assurance and Security

Research Article

An Architecture for Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering on Web Portals

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/IAS.2007.83,
        author={Waseem  Ahmad and Ashfaq  Khokhar},
        title={An Architecture for Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering on Web Portals},
        proceedings={3rd International ICST Symposium on  Information Assurance and Security},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={IAS},
        year={2007},
        month={9},
        keywords={Biclustering  Collaborative Filtering  Crossing Minimization  Homomorphic Cryptosystems  Privacy Enhancing Technologies  Threshold},
        doi={10.1109/IAS.2007.83}
    }
    
  • Waseem Ahmad
    Ashfaq Khokhar
    Year: 2007
    An Architecture for Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering on Web Portals
    IAS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/IAS.2007.83
Waseem Ahmad1,*, Ashfaq Khokhar1,*
  • 1: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Illinois Chicago IL 60607
*Contact email: wahmad@ieee.org, ashfaq@uic.edu

Abstract

Popular E-commerce portals such as Amazon and eBay require user personal data to be stored on their servers for serving these users with personalized recommendations. These recommendations are derived by virtue of collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering (CF) is a method to perform automated recommendations based upon the assumption that users who had similar interests in past, will have similar interests in future too. Storing user personal information at such servers has given rise to a number of privacy concerns [13] which are effecting business of these services [15]. In this paper, we present a novel architecture for privacy preserving collaborative filtering for these services. The proposed architecture attempts to restore user trust in these services by introducing the notion of 'distributed trust'. This essentially mean that instead of trusting a single server, a coalition of servers is trusted. Distributions of trust makes the proposed architecture fault resilient and robust against security attacks. Moreover, the architecture employs an efficient crossing minimization based biclustering algorithm for collaborative filtering. This algorithm is easily amenable to privacy preserving implementation. The privacy preserving implementation makes use of a threshold homomorphic cryptosystem. The proposed algorithm is fully implemented and evaluated with encouraging results.