In this paper, we propose privacy-enhancing technologies for medical tests and personalized medicine methods that use patients' genomic data. Focusing on genetic diseasesusceptibility tests, we develop a new architecture (between the patient and the medical unit) and propose a "privacypreserving disease susceptibility test" (PDS) by using homomorphic encryption and proxy re-encryption. Assuming the whole genome sequencing to be done by a certified institution, we propose to store patients' genomic data encrypted by their public keys at a "storage and processing unit" (SPU). Our proposed solution lets the medical unit retrieve the encrypted genomic data from the SPU and process it for medical tests and personalized medicine methods, while preserving the privacy of patients' genomic data. We also quantify the genomic privacy of a patient (from the medical unit's point of view) and show how a patient's genomic privacy decreases with the genetic tests he undergoes due to (i) the nature of the genetic test, and (ii) the characteristics of the genomic data. Furthermore, we show how basic policies and obfuscation methods help to keep the genomic privacy of a patient at a high level. We also implement and show, via a complexity analysis, the practicality of PDS.
Ayday et al. proposed a scheme to protect the privacy of users' genomic data yet enable medical units to access the genomic data in order to conduct medical tests or to develop personalized medicine methods REF .
Protecting and evaluating genomic privacy in medical tests and personalized medicine
WPES '13
Computer Science