Citizen-centered, auditable and privacy-preserving population genomics

The growing number of health-data breaches, the use of genomic databases for law enforcement purposes and the lack of transparency of personal genomics companies are raising unprecedented privacy concerns. To enable a secure exploration of genomic datasets with controlled and transparent data access, we propose a citizen-centric approach that combines cryptographic privacy-preserving technologies, such as homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computation, with the auditability of blockchains. Our open-source implementation supports queries on the encrypted genomic data of hundreds of thousands of individuals, with minimal overhead. We show that real-world adoption of our system alleviates widespread privacy concerns and encourages data access sharing with researchers. Sharing of personal genomics data raises privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data. A citizen-centric approach involving cryptographic privacy-preserving technologies and blockchains is proposed to address this problem.