Privacy-preserving use of genomic data on mobile devices

Abstract

The rapid development of genomic technologies, especially the DNA sequencing progress, greatly decreases the costs in genome sequencing, which leads to a high availability of genomic data in the near future (e.g., medical test and healthcare). Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of smartphones and mobile connectivity makes it an inevitable trend to use genomic data on mobile devices. However, since one's genomic information is the ultimate identifier of an individual and contains sensitive private data (e.g., disease predispositions, ancestry information, etc.), the use of genomic data may raise serious privacy concerns. Therefore, it is necessary to find ways of using genomic data on mobile devices without disclosure and abuse of the individual's privacy. In this paper, we provide a general framework for storing and processing genomic data privately, in which dynamic symmetric searchable encryption (DSSE) is employed for users to efficiently retrieve their needed genomic data from the Cloud Storage Provider (CSP). Then, users can implement the genetic disease susceptibility test with these genomic data on their mobile devices. Our proposed framework can achieve a higher privacy preserving level at a lower computation cost. Performance evaluation shows the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed scheme.