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Genodroid: are privacy-preserving genomic tests ready for prime time?

Published: 15 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

As fast and accurate sequencing of human genomes becomes affordable, it is expected that individuals will soon be able to carry around copies of their sequenced DNA, using it for medical, identification, and social purposes. This will undoubtedly prompt a wide range of new and interesting genomic applications. However, the very same progress raises some worrisome privacy issues, since a genome represents a treasure trove of highly personal and sensitive information. Some recent research explored privacy-preserving personal genomic operations by applying (or customizing) cryptographic protocols based on techniques such as: conditional oblivious transfer, garbled circuits, and homomorphic encryption. In this paper, we take this line of work a step further by investigating real-world practicality and usability of (as well as interest in) some of these methods. Motivated by both medical and social applications, we aim to test viability of privacy-agile computational genomic tests in a portable and pervasive setting of modern smartphones. We design a personal genomic toolkit (called GenoDroid), implement it on the Android platform, assess its performance, and conduct a pilot usability study that yields some interesting results.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WPES '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society
    October 2012
    150 pages
    ISBN:9781450316637
    DOI:10.1145/2381966
    • General Chair:
    • Ting Yu,
    • Program Chair:
    • Nikita Borisov
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 15 October 2012

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    1. cryptographic protocols
    2. dna
    3. privacy

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    October 15, 2012
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    • (2023)Balancing Security and Privacy in Genomic Range QueriesACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/357579626:3(1-28)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2023
    • (2023)Multi-party Threshold Private Set Intersection Cardinality Based On Encrypted Bloom Filter2023 IEEE International Conferences on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing & Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical & Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData) and IEEE Congress on Cybermatics (Cybermatics)10.1109/iThings-GreenCom-CPSCom-SmartData-Cybermatics60724.2023.00098(503-511)Online publication date: 17-Dec-2023
    • (2022)P2GT: Fine-Grained Genomic Data Access Control With Privacy-Preserving Testing in Cloud ComputingIEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics10.1109/TCBB.2021.306338819:4(2385-2398)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
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