Sequre: a high-performance framework for rapid development of secure bioinformatics pipelines

Haris Smajlovic, Ariya Shajii, Bonnie Berger, Hyunghoon Cho, Ibrahim Numanagic

Abstract: Genomic data leaks are irreversible. Leaked DNA cannot be changed, stays disclosed indefinitely, and affects the owner's family members as well. The recent large-scale genomic data collections [1], [2] render the traditional privacy protection mechanisms, like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), inadequate for protection against the novel security attacks [3]. On the other hand, data access restrictions hinder important clinical research that requires large datasets to operate [4]. These concerns can be naturally addressed by the employment of privacy-enhancing technologies, such as a secure multiparty computation (MPC) [5]–[10]. Secure MPC enables computation on data without disclosing the data itself by dividing the data and computation between multiple computing parties in a distributed manner to prevent individual computing parties from accessing raw data. MPC systems are being increasingly adopted in fields that operate on sensitive datasets [11]–[13], such as computational genomics and biomedical research [14]–[22].