Paper 2017/228

Efficient and Secure Outsourcing of Genomic Data Storage

João Sá Sousa, Cédric Lefebvre, Zhicong Huang, Jean Louis Raisaro, Carlos Aguilar, Marc-Olivier Killijian, and Jean-Pierre Hubaux

Abstract

Cloud computing is becoming the preferred solution for efficiently dealing with the increasing amount of genomic data. Yet, outsourcing storage and processing of sensitive data, such as genomic data, comes with important concerns related to privacy and security. This calls for new sophisticated techniques that ensure data protection from untrusted cloud providers and still enables researchers to obtain useful information. We present a novel privacy-preserving algorithm for fully outsourcing the storage of large genomic data files to a public cloud and enable researchers to efficiently search for variants of interest. To preserve data and query confidentiality from possible leakage, our solution exploits optimal encoding for genomic variants and combines it with homomorphic encryption and private information retrieval. The proposed algorithm is implemented in C++ and evaluated on real data as part of the 2016 iDash genome privacy-protection challenge. Results show that our solution outperforms the state-of-the-art and enables researchers to search over millions of encrypted variants in a few seconds. As opposed to prior beliefs that sophisticated privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are unpractical for real operational settings, our solution demonstrates that, in the case of genomic data, PETs can represent very efficient enablers.

Note: The article has been revised to include a copyright notice CC BY 2.0 (Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0). I also changed the format of the paper (IEEEtran template).

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. BMC Medical Genomics
Keywords
secure outsourcinghomomorphic encryptionprivate information retrievalgenomic variantsiDash
Contact author(s)
joao gomesdesaesousa @ epfl ch
History
2018-12-03: revised
2017-03-08: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/228
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/228,
      author = {João Sá Sousa and Cédric Lefebvre and Zhicong Huang and Jean Louis Raisaro and Carlos Aguilar and Marc-Olivier Killijian and Jean-Pierre Hubaux},
      title = {Efficient and Secure Outsourcing of Genomic Data Storage},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/228},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/228}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/228}
}
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