IACR News item: 05 May 2015
Efficient Server-Aided Secure Two-Party Function Evaluation with Applications to Genomic Computation
Marina Blanton, Fattaneh Bayatbabolghani
ePrint Reportit for medical or other purposes such as ancestry or paternity testing.
Non-medical uses of genomic data in a computation often take place in a
server-mediated setting where the server offers the ability for joint
genomic testing between the users. Undeniably, genomic data is highly
sensitive, which in contrast to other biometry types, discloses a plethora
of information not only about the data owner, but also about his or her
relatives. Thus, there is an urgent need to protect genomic data, especially
when it is used in computation for what we call as recreational
non-health-related purposes. Towards this goal, in this work we put forward
a framework for server-aided secure two-party computation with the security
model motivated by genomic applications. One particular security setting
that we treat in this work provides stronger security guarantees with
respect to malicious users than the traditional malicious model. In
particular, we incorporate certified inputs into secure computation based on
garbled circuit evaluation to guarantee that a malicious user is unable to
modify her inputs in order to learn unauthorized information about the other
user\'s data.
Our solutions are general in the sense that they can be used to securely
evaluate arbitrary functions and offer attractive performance compared to
the state of the art. We apply the general constructions to three specific
types of genomic tests: paternity, genetic compatibility, and ancestry
testing and implement the constructions. The results show that all such
private tests can be executed within a matter of seconds or less despite the
large size of one\'s genomic data.
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