Long-term integrity protection of genomic data

Abstract

Genomic data is crucial in the understanding of many diseases and for the guidance of medical treatments. Pharmacogenomics and cancer genomics are just two areas in precision medicine of rapidly growing utilization. At the same time, whole-genome sequencing costs are plummeting below $ 1000, meaning that a rapid growth in full-genome data storage requirements is foreseeable. While privacy protection of genomic data is receiving growing attention, integrity protection of this long-lived and highly sensitive data much less so. We consider a scenario inspired by future pharmacogenomics, in which a patient's genome data is stored over a long time period while random parts of it are periodically accessed by authorized parties such as doctors and clinicians. A protection scheme is described that preserves integrity of the genomic data in that scenario over a time horizon of 100 years. During such a long time period, cryptographic schemes will potentially break and therefore our scheme allows to update the integrity protection. Furthermore, integrity of parts of the genomic data can be verified without compromising the privacy of the remaining data. Finally, a performance evaluation and cost projection shows that privacy-preserving long-term integrity protection of genomic data is resource demanding, but in reach of current and future hardware technology and has negligible costs of storage.

Legal aspects of privacy-enhancing technologies in genome-wide association studies and their impact on performance and feasibility

“…Another data protection and security challenge is that personal data must be kept secure either until its deleted or for at least the duration of the data subject’s life [ 40 ], if not for that of close family members. The latter could be the case for genomic data: they differ from other personal data as they are directly linked to more than one person.…”

Towards Protect a Specific Information in Genomic Data

“…Johannes Buchmann et al [13] proposed a secure storage solution of genetic data in a certified database for 100 years. The proposed framework, allows maintaining the integrity and authenticity of the full set of raw sequencer reads, alignment and genomic variant data and also a query of specific position in the genome.…”

Privacy and Integrity Preserving Computations with CRISP

“…In the existing literature, several works specialize in the challenges imposed by the above use cases but provide only partial solutions by either addressing privacy [12], [32], [40], [41], [72], [73], or integrity [22], [37], [83], [86]. The handful of works addressing both challenges require significant modifications to existing hardware or software infrastructures.…”