Towards Protect a Specific Information in Genomic Data

Abstract

Research on the privacy of human genomic data has significantly increased these last years to find out effective solutions to protect the most critical information resulting from an alignment operation such as the genomic position, cigar and Read content. In this paper, the authors propose an encoding technique based on homomorphic encryption to protect genomic positions of DNA sequences for a secure storage of BAM file. This technique uses two Discrete Gaussian Sampling algorithms for comparison purposes which is Gauss and Knuth-Yao algorithm. The framework was implemented on Java from scratch using container data structure with standard java HashMap for the representation of duplicates positions elements exiting in BAM file. The proposed method was assessed on the NA12878 dataset with initially 2 million positions to encrypt. Obtained results show that the FV-Knuth-Yao technique with HashMap architecture storing 165667 positions and a polynomial degree equal to 64 ensures a fast encryption time estimated to 6,5 minutes. The decryption operation needs 1 hour with zero loss of information. The acceptable security level reached 2 64 operations to break the cryptosystem. To demonstrate the efficiency, security and reliability of our approach, the FV-Knuth-Yao was compared with the OPE Method as implemented in SECRAM tool which is based on a deterministic encryption scheme. Our work mainly focuses on the security of genomic data without compression of BAM file.

Preserving Genotype Privacy Using AES and Partially Homomorphic Encryption

“…The genomic sequence is encoded as an integer ranging from 1 to 16 as shown in Table 1. For example, the sequence "ATCGAGTGCC" can be expressed as ["AT", "CG", "AG", "TG", "CC"] and is encoded to [1,7,3,12,5] as shown in Table 2.…”

“…The primary goal is mass sequencing of nucleotide sequences. Tremendous technological evolution has been witnessed in the field and now it is no longer limited to the determination of sequences but also involves the analysis of both genes and proteins in terms of expression and function [1]. The genome is the carrier of biological genetic information and contains the important genetic information of human beings.…”