My Genome Belongs to Me: Controlling Third Party Computation on Genomic Data

• Main Authors: Deuber Dominic, Egger Christoph, Fech Katharina, Malavolta Giulio, Schröder Dominique, Thyagarajan Sri Aravinda Krishnan, Battke Florian, Durand Claudia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2019-01-01
• Series: Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
• Subjects: secure multi-party computation; protocols; dna security; genome privacy
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2019-0007

An individual’s genetic information is possibly the most valuable personal information. While knowledge of a person’s DNA sequence can facilitate the diagnosis of several heritable diseases and allow personalized treatment, its exposure comes with significant threats to the patient’s privacy. Currently known solutions for privacy-respecting computation require the owner of the DNA to either be heavily involved in the execution of a cryptographic protocol or to completely outsource the access control to a third party. This motivates the demand for cryptographic protocols which enable computation over encrypted genomic data while keeping the owner of the genome in full control. We envision a scenario where data owners can exercise arbitrary and dynamic access policies, depending on the intended use of the analysis results and on the credentials of who is conducting the analysis. At the same time, data owners are not required to maintain a local copy of their entire genetic data and do not need to exhaust their computational resources in an expensive cryptographic protocol.