SIG-DB: Leveraging homomorphic encryption to securely interrogate privately held genomic databases.

Area of Science:

• Genomics
• Bioinformatics
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Genomic data is increasingly valuable for understanding biological function.
• Advances in synthetic biology and reduced sequencing costs are increasing private genomic data.
• Secure storage and processing of sensitive genomic data are critical.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel algorithm for securely searching genomic databases.
• To enable encrypted queries without revealing sensitive data to either party.

Main Methods:

• Developed the Secure Interrogation of Genomic DataBases (SIG-DB) algorithm.
• Utilized locality-sensitive hashing and homomorphic encryption for secure comparisons.

Main Results:

• SIG-DB allows encrypted sequence-to-sequence comparisons.
• The algorithm prevents the database owner from seeing the query and the querier from seeing database sequences.

Conclusions:

• SIG-DB offers a groundbreaking solution for privacy-preserving genomic data analysis.
• This method enhances the security of sensitive genetic information in databases.