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Privacy Preserving Record Linkage

This is the implementation of the Privacy Preserving Record Linkage method presented in Accelerating Privacy-Preserving Medical Record Linkage: A Three-Party MPC Approach

Installation

No installation is required.

Make sure to clone the repository using the "--recurse-submodules" or "--recurse" flag to initialise the submodules as well.

If you already have a local version of this repository without submodules, use the command "git submodule update --init --recursive" to initialise the submodules.

Building

After cloning the repo into directory PPRL, you can build the library PPRL by executing the following commands.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -S ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make

After the build completes, the output binaries can be found in PPRL/build/ directory.

Usage

./record_linkage Role <helper_port> <helper_ip> <proxy1_port> <proxy1_ip> <record_count> <parallelism>
./record_linkage Role <helper_port> <helper_ip> <proxy1_port> <proxy1_ip> <record_count> <parallelism>
./record_linkage Role <helper_port> <helper_ip> <proxy1_port> <proxy1_ip> <record_count> <parallelism>

Role: Specifies the role of the entity running the program:

  • proxy1 — First proxy server.
  • proxy2 — Second proxy server.
  • helper — Helper server.

helper_port: Port number for the helper server.

helper_ip: IP address of the helper server.

proxy1_port: Port number for the first proxy server.

proxy1_ip: IP address of the first proxy server.

record_count: Number of records in the second database that will be linked or compared against.

parallelism: Controls how many records from X (first dataset) are processed at a time to ensure efficient memory use, as storing all comparison data for large datasets in memory simultaneously may be impractical.

Local Test Example

For local testing, you can simulate record linkage between the datasets given:

# Start the helper
./record_linkage helper 7777 127.0.0.1 8888 127.0.0.1 100 1

# Start proxy1 (with 1 record in first database)
./record_linkage proxy1 7777 127.0.0.1 8888 127.0.0.1 1 1

# Start proxy2 (with 100 records in second database)
./record_linkage proxy2 7777 127.0.0.1 8888 127.0.0.1 100 1

This setup demonstrates how to run the protocol locally, linking a single record from one dataset against 100 records from another. You can adjust the number of records.

Program Output

The program outputs matching results for records in the first dataset as follows:

Index   isMatch?   Matching
0       1          0
Total Time 0.0637471
  • Index: The position of the record in the first dataset.
  • isMatch?: Indicates if a match was found:
    • 1 if the similarity score exceeds the threshold (currently 0.8).
    • 0 if no match exceeds the threshold.
  • Matching: The index of the matched record in the second dataset ((r_2)). If no match is found, this field may be empty or set to a default value.

Viewing Exact Similarity Scores

To view the exact similarity scores for matches, modify the GetMatches function in record_linkage.h. Look for the commented lines in the function that guide where to enable score output.

License

MIT