Whole Genome Sequencing: Innovation Dream or Privacy Nightmare?
- 16:00 3rd July 2014 ( week 10, Trinity Term 2014 )Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building
Recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies have put ubiquitous availability of whole human genomes within reach. It is no longer hard to imagine the day when everyone will have the means to obtain and store one's own DNA sequence. Widespread and affordable availability of whole genomes immediately opens up important opportunities in a number of health-related fields as genomic tests can be conducted in computation. New applications will be developed as genome-enabled medicine becomes increasingly preventive and personalized. However, the very same progress also amplifies worrisome privacy concerns, since a genome represents a treasure trove of highly personal and sensitive information.
In this talk, we will overview biomedical advances in genomics and discuss associated privacy, ethical, and security challenges. We begin to address privacy-respecting genomic tests by focusing on some important applications, such as, Personalized Medicine, Paternity Tests, Ancestry Testing, and Genetic Compatibility Tests. After analyzing these applications and their requirements, we propose a set of efficient privacy-enhancing techniques based on private set operations. This allows us to implement, in silico, some operations that are currently performed via in vitro methods, in a secure fashion. Finally, we explore a few alternatives to securely store human genomes and allow authorized parties to run tests in such a way that only the required minimum amount of information is disclosed, and present an Android API framework geared for privacy-preserving genomic testing.
Speaker bio
Emiliano De Cristofaro is a Senior Lecturer at University College London (UCL). Prior to joining UCL in 2013, he was a Research Scientist at PARC (a Xerox Company). In 2011, he received a PhD in Networked Systems and Surfing from the University of California, Irvine, advised by Gene Tsudik, and, in 2005 a B.Sc. in Computer Science from University of Salerno, Italy. His research interests include privacy, security, and applied cryptography. In 2011, he received the Dean's Dissertation Fellowship from UC Irvine and, in 2012, the Excellency Award from PARC's Computer Science Lab. He is currently chairing the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), a fact that took two years away from his life expectancy. His homepage is available at http://emilianodc.comShare this:
