New genome sequencing technologies have simplified the generation of genomic data, making them more common but in turn a likely target of attack. Security strategies have been devised such as restricting the amount of information that can be queried or using new encryption techniques.These solutions might not be enough if the entire file has to be shared, as the recipient might leak the accessible information. This contribution addresses this issue using watermarking. Each read in a genomic file is modified depending on its content and a secret key. This allows generating different watermarked instances of the original file. Each watermark acts as a fingerprint: if a leak occurs, the unique modifications of the instance points to who originated the unauthorized publication. Using the key, the modifications can be undone. This allows sharing a leak-discouraging version with which the relevance of a file can be assessed, and can be reversed to the original if needed.

The MPEG-G standardization initiative is a coordinated international effort to specify a compressed data format that enables large scale genomic data to be processed, transported and shared. The standard consists of a set of specifications (i.e., a book) describing: i) a normative format syntax, and ii) a normative decoding process to retrieve the information coded in a compliant file or bitstream. Such decoding process enables the use of leading-edge compression technologies that have exhibited significant compression gains over currently used formats for storage of unaligned and aligned sequencing reads. Additionally, the standard provides a wealth of much needed functionality, such as selective access, data aggregation, application programming interfaces to the compressed data, standard interfaces to support data protection mechanisms, support for streaming and a procedure to assess the conformance of implementations. ISO/IEC is engaged in supporting the maintenance and availability of the standard specification, which guarantees the perenniality of applications using MPEG-G. Finally, the standard ensures interoperability and integration with existing genomic information processing pipelines by providing support for conversion from the FASTQ/SAM/BAM file formats.In this paper we provide an overview of the MPEG-G specification, with particular focus on the main advantages and novel functionality it offers. As the standard only specifies the decoding process, encoding performance, both in terms of speed and compression ratio, can vary depending on specific encoder implementations, and will likely improve during the lifetime of MPEG-G. Hence, the performance statistics provided here are only indicative baseline examples of the technologies included in the standard.

No abstract

No abstract

New genome sequencing technologies have decreased the cost of generating genomic data, thus increasing storage needs. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) working group MPEG has developed a standard for genomic data compression with encryption features. The approach taken in standard MPEG-G (ISO/IEC 23092) to compress genomic information was to group similar data into streams. Taking this into account, one of the protection options considered was to encrypt each stream separately. In this paper, we show that an attacker can use an unencrypted stream to deduce the encrypted content if streams are encrypted separately. To do so, we present two different attacks, one based on signal processing and the other one based on neural networks. The signal-based attack only works with unrealistic settings, whereas the neural network-based one recovers data with realistic settings (regarding read length and coverage). The presented results made MPEG reconsider the encryption strategy, before final publication of the standard, discarding separate streams encryption approach.