Protecting genomic data

In this talk, we will describe the unique portfolio of solutions we have developed to protect genomic data, in tight collaboration with the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), the Swiss HIV cohort clinicians, the EPFL School of Life Science, a Lausanne-headquartered company called Sophia Genetics, and the GA4GH Security Working Group. We will first introduce a few relevant cryptographic techniques, including deterministic, semantically-secure, property-preserving, (partially) homomorphic encryption, as well as secure multi-party computation (we commit to make it fully understandable by a non-specialist audience). We will then discuss possible architectures for genomic (and phenotypic) data generation, processing, and protection, and present the solutions we are currently deploying along the data pipeline.<br>We will then address the benefits (and limitations) of using partial homomorphic encryption for the protection of VCF files, and mention the pros and cons of the Paillier and ElGamal schemes. We will also discuss solutions based on Lattice-based cryptography and on trusted hardware such as Intel SGX. Then, we will detail our solution for the protection of the Swiss HIV cohort. We will also address data protection in the framework of multi-site studies. Finally, we will discuss the protection of BAM files.<br>