GenoGuard: Protecting Genomic Data against Brute-Force Attacks

Abstract

Abstract-Secure storage of genomic data is of great and increasing importance. The scientific community's improving ability to interpret individuals' genetic materials and the growing size of genetic database populations have been aggravating the potential consequences of data breaches. The prevalent use of passwords to generate encryption keys thus poses an especially serious problem when applied to genetic data. Weak passwords can jeopardize genetic data in the short term, but given the multidecade lifespan of genetic data, even the use of strong passwords with conventional encryption can lead to compromise.We present a tool, called GenoGuard, for providing strong protection for genomic data both today and in the long term. GenoGuard incorporates a new theoretical framework for encryption called honey encryption (HE): it can provide information-theoretic confidentiality guarantees for encrypted data. Previously proposed HE schemes, however, can be applied to messages from, unfortunately, a very restricted set of probability distributions. Therefore, GenoGuard addresses the open problem of applying HE techniques to the highly non-uniform probability distributions that characterize sequences of genetic data.In GenoGuard, a potential adversary can attempt exhaustively to guess keys or passwords and decrypt via a bruteforce attack. We prove that decryption under any key will yield a plausible genome sequence, and that GenoGuard offers an information-theoretic security guarantee against messagerecovery attacks. We also explore attacks that use side information. Finally, we present an efficient and parallelized software implementation of GenoGuard.

Cryptographic Solutions for Credibility and Liability Issues of Genomic Data

“…Recently, Wang et al proposed private edit distance protocols to find similar patients (e.g., across several hospitals) [4]. To provide secure storage and retrieval of genomic data, Ayday et al proposed techniques for the privacy-preserving storage and retrieval of raw-genomic data [5], and Huang et al proposed a scheme that would guarantee long-term security (in an information-theoretical sense) for genomic data [6].…”

Inference Attacks against Kin Genomic Privacy

“…24 Finally, Zhicong Huang and his colleagues developed an information-theoretical technique to securely store genomic data. 25 One last line of investigation has explored the use of cryptography-based techniques such as homomorphic encryption, secure hardware, and secure multiparty computation. 26,27 …”

Protecting Private Data by Honey Encryption

“…However, genomic data usually has highly nonuniform probability distributions. The GenoGuard mechanism [1] incorporates the honey encryption concept to provide information-theoretic confidentiality guarantees for encrypted genomic data.…”

“…In [1,5,11], a fixed distribution-transforming encoder (DTE) is utilised for encryption and decryption, so it is only suitable for binary bit streams or integer sequences, not for images and videos. Yoon et al [12] propose a visual honey encryption concept which employs an adaptive DTE so that the proposed concept can be applied to more complex domains including images and videos.…”

“…Some store them in a plaintext format. Some employ password-based encryption (PBE) [1]. However, the robustness of encryption depends on the key length.…”