Secure signal processing for genomic privacy protection

Résumé

The field of genomic research has considerably grown in recent years due to the unprece-dented advances conducted by Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). Developments in this field have resulted in the current high availability of genomic data. The increasing affordabil-ity of genome sequencing and, as a consequence, widespread availability of genomic data open up new opportunities in the field of medicine. On the other hand, this rapid increase also poses severe privacy risks due to the inherently sensitive nature of genomic information. As DNA information is unique and correlated among family members, it cannot be regarded as just a matter of individual privacy concern. The availability of genomic data raises profound privacy implications as it includes information about an individual’s phenotype, ethnicity, family members, disease conditions, and more. These privacy implications may sometimes even be barriers to both medical research and the availability of genomic data. Therefore, recently, researchers proposed privacy-preserving techniques to process genomic data. Scien-tists