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

Deuber D, Egger C, Fech K, Malavolta G, Schröder D, Thyagarajan SAK, Battke F, Durand C (2019)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Journal article, Original article

Publication year: 2019

Journal

Book Volume: 2019

Pages Range: 108-132

Article Number: 7

Journal Issue: 1

DOI: 10.2478/popets-2019-0007

Open Access Link: https://www.petsymposium.org/2019/files/papers/issue1/popets-2019-0007.pdf

Abstract

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, they 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.

In this work, we present METIS, a system that assists the computation over encrypted data stored in the cloud while leaving the decision on admissible computations to the data owner. A critical feature of our system is that the data owner is free from computational overload and her communication complexity is independent of the size of the input data and only linear in the size of the circuit's output. METIS is based on garbled circuits and supports any polynomially-computable function. We demonstrate the practicality of our approach with an implementation and an evaluation of several functions over real datasets.

Authors with CRIS profile

Involved external institutions

CeGaT GmbH Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Deuber, D., Egger, C., Fech, K., Malavolta, G., Schröder, D., Thyagarajan, S.A.K.,... Durand, C. (2019). My Genome Belongs to Me: Controlling Third Party Computation on Genomic Data. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2019(1), 108-132. https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2019-0007

MLA:

Deuber, Dominic, et al. "My Genome Belongs to Me: Controlling Third Party Computation on Genomic Data." Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2019.1 (2019): 108-132.

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