PriGenX: Privacy-Preserving Query With Anonymous Access Control for Genomic Data

Abstract

Presently, similar sequence search is a fundamental technique in genomic data research. Patients or researchers, who want to check whether they or their research objects have genetic diseases or potential illnesses, need to query similar sequences with their genes in certain genomic databases. As a consequence, this may raise privacy issues since the genomic data are regarded as an identifier of each individual and contain lots of sensitive information. Up to date, some solutions have been brought up for achieving secure similarity search over genomic data, but they are still defective in searching exact similar sequences, supporting fine-grained access control, preventing side information leakage, and being built on strong security models at the same time. In this paper, aiming at the above challenge, we propose a maliciously secure similar sequence search scheme with fine-grained access control over genomic data, named PriGenX. Based on oblivious transfer and authenticated garbling techniques, our scheme also supports secure access control with anonymity for protecting the identity of each party preventing side information leakage, and implementing a flexible over-threshold similarity search. Experimental results and security analysis indicate that our scheme is scalable and maliciously secure.