Efficient and Secure Decision Tree Classification for Cloud-Assisted Online Diagnosis Services

Decision tree classification has become a prevailing technique for online diagnosis services. By outsourcing computation intensive tasks to a cloud server, cloud-assisted online diagnosis services are better ways for cases that the storage and computation requirements exceed the capability of medical institutions. With privacy concerns as well as intellectual property protection issues, the valuable diagnosis classifier and the sensitive user data should be protected against the cloud server. In this paper, we identify a work-flow for cloud-assisted online diagnosis services. We propose an efficient and secure decision tree classification scheme in the proposed work-flow. Specifically, the medical institution transforms a locally pre-trained decision tree classifier to a decision table, and later uses searchable symmetric encryption to encrypt the decision table. Then, the encrypted table is outsourced to the cloud server, and a user can submit encrypted physiological features to the cloud server and obtain an encrypted diagnosis prediction back. We provide formal security proofs to demonstrate that our scheme protects the confidentiality of the decision tree classifier and the user's data. The performance analysis shows that our scheme achieves faster-than-linear classification speed. Experimental evaluations show that our scheme requires several micro-seconds to process a diagnosis request in the tested datasets.