Efficient Determination of Equivalence for Encrypted Data

TL;DR

This paper presents an efficient method for determining equivalence of encrypted data, crucial for secure record linkage in healthcare, leveraging existing greater-than evaluation techniques to ensure privacy and regulatory compliance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, efficient approach for encrypted data equivalence testing based on extending existing greater-than evaluation methods.

Findings

Effective on real healthcare data

Meets regulatory privacy criteria

Outperforms previous methods in efficiency

Abstract

Secure computation of equivalence has fundamental application in many different areas, including healthcare. We study this problem in the context of matching an individual identity to link medical records across systems. We develop an efficient solution for equivalence based on existing work that can evaluate the greater than relation. We implement the approach and demonstrate its effectiveness on data, as well as demonstrate how it meets regulatory criteria for risk.