Private Computation on Encrypted Genomic Data

• Published in: Progress in Cryptology - LATINCRYPT 2014 Vol. 8895; pp. 3 - 27
• Main Authors: Lauter, Kristin, López-Alt, Adriana, Naehrig, Michael
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2015; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Computer security; Data encryption; Encrypt Data; Genotype Count; Homomorphic Encryption; Homomorphic Encryption Scheme; Network hardware; Statistical Algorithm
• ISBN: 9783319162942; 3319162942
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-16295-9_1

A number of databases around the world currently host a wealth of genomic data that is invaluable to researchers conducting a variety of genomic studies. However, patients who volunteer their genomic data run the risk of privacy invasion. In this work, we give a cryptographic solution to this problem: to maintain patient privacy, we propose encrypting all genomic data in the database. To allow meaningful computation on the encrypted data, we propose using a homomorphic encryption scheme. Specifically, we take basic genomic algorithms which are commonly used in genetic association studies and show how they can be made to work on encrypted genotype and phenotype data. In particular, we consider the Pearson Goodness-of-Fit test, the \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$D'$$\end{document} and \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$r^2$$\end{document}-measures of linkage disequilibrium, the Estimation Maximization (EM) algorithm for haplotyping, and the Cochran-Armitage Test for Trend. We also provide performance numbers for running these algorithms on encrypted data.