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New Encryption Scheme Could Protect Your Genome
sciencehabit writes "As the cost of genetic sequencing plummets, experts believe our genomes will help doctors detect diseases and save lives. But not all of us are comfortable releasing our biological blueprints into the world. Now cryptologists are perfecting a new privacy tool that turns genetic information into a secure yet functional format. Called homomorphic encryption, the method could help keep genomes private even as genetic testing shifts to cheap online cloud services."
This isn't new, although the application with gene sequencing might be.
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We can't even keep credit card information private, and that's not just a matter of someone else's privacy, it's a matter of actually losing money.
What hope is there really of keeping your genome private if you are sending it across the internet?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sadly, the story selection on that site is even worse than on slashdot.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What's wrong with AES256 for protecting my Gnome?
he said homo
Encryption can be broken, especially the kind that exposes useful information about the plaintext as this one does. A much simpler alternative is to keep your genetic information in your own control, processing it on your own computer with open source software. You know, just what we already do with other sensitive information like passwords.
That requires a mitochondria upgrade at extra charge. Or else you might experience complications.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm trying to say something intelligent involving homomorphic encryption with random seeds and salt that doesn't trigger the Beavis & Butthead reflex, but I just can't make it happen.
If I were not constantly releasing millions of copies of my DNA in the form of dead skin cells everywhere I go. Either my cells need to also adopt this encryption standard, or I need a lifestyle where I am completely self sufficient (including my waste disposal), never having to leave my home.
Even then, a gust of wind while I am in the backyard might be all that is required one day for someone's reader to catch my DNA and run a simulation to match with facial recognition.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I am not a cryptography expert, but I have been supporting genomic medicine for 10 years. For Homomorphic encryption to be of any use in research, or diagnostics, it is necessary to know that each genetic sequence is encrypted to the same results. That is XYZ for person 1 has to be the same genetic sequence as XYZ for person 2. Otherwise we are comparing apples to wood and the results are gibberish. So if XYZ is XYZ is XYZ, how is that any more secure, from a genetic profiling, etc. POV than the raw genetic sequence? It's like saying your SSN is safe, no one will know it is 123-45-6789, we "secured" it as abc-de-fghi but otherwise is just as unique in identifying you. Am I missing something here?
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
Sounds more like Power Rangers to me. You know, transforming people into something gay.
Ezekiel 23:20
That is from over four years ago, which, in a field that moves as fast as cryptography, might as well be a lifetime. There have been at least five new generations of homomorphic encryption since then, to the point that it is trillions of times faster now than it was when he posted that.
So true. But DNA security is more that an issue of privacy. In the near future, understanding the human genome will make possible developing bioweapons targeted at individuals (with collateral damage) as well as bioweapons that could probably kill all humans exposed to the pathogen (like Ebola). We have, up to now, been protected by the obscurity and complexity of the issue. With advanced computers, vast data collection, and improved scientific understanding, creating individual and global bioweapons will become college-level biochemistry. Maybe not this decade, but probably within several decades (my guesstimate). In that sense, the movie GATTACA was a utopian fantasy, because people did not live in fear of apocalypse every day given everyone's DNA was known precisely and used for identification.
For current trends, consider recent US government activities (but other countries might do it too):
"U.S. Chases Foreign Leaders' DNA, WikiLeaks Shows"
http://www.wired.com/dangerroo...
"State Department representatives didn't immediately respond to questions about why diplomats need to acquire DNA and other biometric data on foreigners, what State does with any biometric information it gets, or how long the department retains it."
And also:
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
"The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well--the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace. "
Unlike private encryption keys for a computer system, or a lock and key for your front door, you can't easily change your DNA if someone else gets a sample of it (like from a used drinking glass). In fact, so far, you can't significantly change your DNA at all. And the fact is, probably almost every citizen in the Western world already has taken some kind of medical test where potentially, if archived, their specific DNA would be available. So, we are probably already all compromised..
So, sadly, this trend towards increased genetic understanding may eventually mean the end of human day-to-day living as we know it in the near future (if not actual life). Individually targeted weapons are actually a lesser worry. Imagine a vast plague launched by some genetic-script kiddy showing off how "1eet" they are. Imagine a flu season where just everyone who gets it dies a few weeks after seemingly getting well -- and where everyone gets it. Or imagine perhaps 10 bad flu seasons in a row year after year, each with 30% mortality like the black plague.
Remember, unlike computer viruses, you can't right now just issue a patch for human DNA. And even if you could, the patch itself might be deadly. So avoidance may be the only option if the virus has been specifically designed to target some newly discovered human weakness in all human DNA.
Of course, we face similar risks in theory with nanotechnology, and groups like the Foresight Institute have discussed them. But, nanotechnology in the form of sophisticated mobile nanobots is still theoretical. Biotechnology and disease is a reality of our every day lives.
Preventing this risk of a 100% fatal designer plague would probably mean changing large aspects of how we live. This might include living in air-tight Biosphere-II-like structures and/or space habitats. Could it be that human tribalism and sparring at borders had evolutionary adaptive value to keep tribes mostly isolated to prevent disease transmission? Perhaps things might even go so far as never being in the physical presence of another human being and never receiving a physical object including food from outside your enclosure (
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Honestly I don't see much attack on the practicality there. He highlights the *cost* of the technique (*much* slower performance), but how much that effects the practicality is entirely domain-dependent. For example the a doctor in TFA performed a genetic risk assessment for some condition in 0.2 seconds. I guarantee you that was by far the fastest part of the entire process - if it takes minutes or hours instead of seconds to perform a thorough genetic workup in such a way that *nobody* except myself or possibly my doctor has the key necessary to decrypt the results then that's probably worth considering. What's an hour of compute time cost you compared to getting your DNA published for the world (and insurance agents) to see?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yeah, better stay away from homogenous beverages as well, just to be safe. If you don't have to shake before opening there's no telling *what* it's doing to your sexuality.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It was a lousy joke.
>Homo means gay
Somebody needs to brush up on their Greek. Homo- as a prefix means "the same", as in homomorphic = the same form.
Or alone as Latin for "man" (as in Homo Sapien = intelligent man, versus homo erectus = upright man)
Yes, I'm perpetually annoyed by ignorant people sexualizing useful words, much less common prefixes. Why do you ask? We've got a perfectly good word for sex, it's even one of the coveted limited-edition single-syllable models reserved for only the most important concepts. Why must we perpetually degrade the language by throwing around euphamisms when everybody knows what we mean anyway?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
they put out ads to hire experienced "editors", and timothy put up his hand.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The main attack you can make on the practicality of this system is that it evisions encrypting the information on one server and then sending it out to another server to perform operations on it. If a test that takes .2 seconds is a billion times slower than it needs to be, that means that any garden variety computer can perform that test very, very quickly. You can use a fancy encryption method that may already be broken to send out the DNA to some virtual "lab" as if you were sending out a blood sample, or you can just do it more securely locally. Store it with a proven encyption method, then download it to a standalone machine with a custom network port only designed to receive encrypted DNA sequences from the server and some method to receive updated programs (maybe through flash drives), but that can't be compromised because it can never send out information on the network. That would actually be more secure.
What's being advertised in this article is a solution looking for a problem.
That's an interesting comment. Consider hashes as one important part of cryptography. SHA2 is a current standard used by some up-to-date software, while a lot of systems don't support it yet. It's too new to be used everywhere, having been officially standardized thirteen years ago.
Millions of web sites use .htpasswd files which default to DES (1977) and that's just one example out of many software packages that call crypt() to get a DES hash.
I've thought of cryptography as careful, methodical, slow compared to other technology related disciplines.
Sure, most genetic tests amount to looking at a few bits in one or more known places in the data - not exactly advanced calculus. Even with a billionfold performance penalty a desktop PC could probably perform at least a handful of tests in a timely fashion. As for the lab, I suppose I was thinking more about inevitable attempts at corporate lock-in than actual necessity.
For security though... how many doctors have you dealt with on a personal level? These aren't security professionals - their bains are already jam-packed full of random trivia about the human body, if something can go wrong security-wise it will. As Exhibit A I offer pretty much ever health care system in the world with electronic medical records. Homomorphic encryption would simply cut down drastically on what can go wrong, in most cases at only minimal cost. Yes, the tests might be a billion times slower than they could be, but if they still only take five minutes then it's not much of a price to pay for drastically increased security around such sensitive information, no matter how much it may offend our purist sensibilities.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Even with a billionfold performance penalty a desktop PC could probably perform at least a handful of tests in a timely fashion.
If that PC is slightly modified to be a trustworthy device with a proper security model, then there's no reason for the homomorphic encryption. The device can just decrypt the data first, then do every test necessary in a very timely fashion...
As for the lab, I suppose I was thinking more about inevitable attempts at corporate lock-in than actual necessity.
There... there you have have a very good point. This article screams of "force patients to store their DNA on your servers, but provide an argument that's reasonably convincing, even to security, experts that it's safe and secure and not subject to the complete sham that doctor/patient confidentiality has become in this day and age."
For security though... how many doctors have you dealt with on a personal level?
Lots. I currently work for a company that makes medical devices. Lots of clinical trial sites. Lots of opinions from doctors about exactly how things should work.
These aren't security professionals - their bains are already jam-packed full of random trivia about the human body, if something can go wrong security-wise it will.
Believe me, I know this very well by now. Many (not all) of these doctors are also pretty bad at mathematical concepts and sometimes some basic understanding of physical principles which I would have thought would be absolutely vital for them to understand in their specialties. Some manage this even while still being fairly brilliant. There are some in there who also clearly just mechanically worked their way through medical school. Regardless of where they fall on that spectrum, nearly all of them don't have the time or energy to do much worrying about security themselves.
Homomorphic encryption would simply cut down drastically on what can go wrong, in most cases at only minimal cost. Yes, the tests might be a billion times slower than they could be, but if they still only take five minutes then it's not much of a price to pay for drastically increased security around such sensitive information, no matter how much it may offend our purist sensibilities.
Pretty much useless in the fields I'm working in. For one thing, you have to understand that some of our devices produce datasets as big as the human genome in a single patient session, and those patients often have to go in for a lot of sessions. Also, as complicated as DNA itself is, most of the actual testing is going to be more or less of the form: read from position X; does it contain sequence Y? That's oversimplifying, I know, but it's broadly accurate. Analysis of just about any other medical dataset is going to be far more complicated. Where I'm working, there's no automated analysis. Doctors review the data and do diagnosis. Automated diagnostic tools are actually something we have on vague future roadmaps but they're not planned features of anything we're currently working on. They're also not really something that would appeal to 90% of the doctors we work with. Same is true in most of the medical industry. Either you need Doctors to review things, in which case you have to decrypt, or you're doing bioinformatics which is so computationally intensive that anything that would slow it down even a little would cause insane extra costs.
All that said, stored data should definitely be encrypted where practical. That's a no brainer. The cases where you can do anything useful with that data without actually decrypting it at some point are just very limited.
> Analysis of just about any other medical dataset is going to be far more complicated.
Agreed. It's also going to tend to be far less sensitive for the simple fact that it contains far less information about you and your predispositions with regard to health, intelligence, personality, appearance, and everything else with a strong genetic component. It seems to me that homomorphic encryption is a technology with a very narrow window of utility - to wit, protecting extremely sensitive data that needs minimal processing to extract useful results. Secure DNA analysis would seem to be one of the few areas where it could really shine. I mean who's seriously going to outsource secure data processing to the Amazon Cloud at a million-fold increase in required computational power, much less a trillion?
>Automated diagnostic tools are ... not really something that would appeal to 90% of the doctors we work with
I'm not surprised. Modern doctors are largely professional diagnosticians - I have even heard that organic chemistry is a pre-req for medicine not so much because it's particularly relevant (unless you're a research doctor you will probably never care about the chemistry itself), but because it's too complicated to reason your way through, instead requiring you be able to finely hone your instincts - a "gatekeeper" course before being confronted with the even more difficult challenge of patient diagnosis.
Given that, I would not expect doctors to be at all enthusiastic about effective automated diagnostic tools, because an automated system promises to do what a doctor cannot hope to do - rationally analyze all the patient information in the context of the complete body of modern medical knowledge. And then whats left for the doctor to do? Surgeons will be needed for a while yet, but administering shots and setting bones isn't exactly rocket science, a good nurse with a "medical tricorder" could run circles around most doctors, destroying much of the social (and financial) prestige the occupation still holds.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I studied bioinformatics, but I've never understood this illusion of a bunch of goofball scientists toiling away in lab coats somewhere. Modern personal computers are more than capable of doing whatever analysis an individual user might want done. You want expert analysis of your results? Ask a doctor, who is already legally required to keep everything confidential.