SIG-DB: leveraging homomorphic encryption to Securely Interrogate privately held Genomic DataBases
This addresses the need for secure genomic data processing for database owners and queriers, representing a novel application rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of securely querying private genomic databases without revealing sensitive data, presenting the SIG-DB algorithm that enables encrypted sequence-to-sequence comparisons using homomorphic encryption and locality-sensitive hashing.
Genomic data are becoming increasingly valuable as we develop methods to utilize the information at scale and gain a greater understanding of how genetic information relates to biological function. Advances in synthetic biology and the decreased cost of sequencing are increasing the amount of privately held genomic data. As the quantity and value of private genomic data grows, so does the incentive to acquire and protect such data, which creates a need to store and process these data securely. We present an algorithm for the Secure Interrogation of Genomic DataBases (SIG-DB). The SIG-DB algorithm enables databases of genomic sequences to be searched with an encrypted query sequence without revealing the query sequence to the Database Owner or any of the database sequences to the Querier. SIG-DB is the first application of its kind to take advantage of locality-sensitive hashing and homomorphic encryption to allow generalized sequence-to-sequence comparisons of genomic data.