Secure Similar Patients Query on Encrypted Genomic Data

The growing availability of genomic data is unlocking research potentials on genomic-data analysis. It is of great importance to outsource the genomic-analysis tasks onto clouds to leverage their powerful computational resources over the large-scale genomic sequences. However, the remote placement of the data raises personal-privacy concerns, and it is challenging to evaluate data-analysis functions on outsourced genomic data securely and efficiently. In this work, we study the secure similar-sequence-query (SSQ) problem over outsourced genomic data, which has not been fully investigated. To address the challenges of security and efficiency, we propose two protocols in the mixed form, which combine two-party secure secret sharing, garbled circuit, and partial homomorphic encryptions together and use them to jointly fulfill the secure SSQ function. In addition, our protocols support multi-user queries over a joint genomic data set collected from multiple data owners, making our solution scalable. We formally prove the security of protocols under the semi-honest adversary model, and theoretically analyze the performance. We use extensive experiments over real-world dataset on a commercial cloud platform to validate the efficacy of our proposed solution, and demonstrate the performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art works.

The aggregated reverse kNN (ARkNN) query aims to identify one query record with the maximum influence set and has become a powerful tool to support optimal decision-making in crowdsensing. Considering data privacy and query privacy, ARkNN queries should be performed in a private manner. Unfortunately, existing schemes cannot support privacy-preserving ARkNN queries over crowd-sensed data. To address this issue, we propose two efficient and privacy-preserving ARkNN query schemes with different security levels, named the BARQ scheme and the EARQ scheme, where the former can only protect data privacy while the latter can protect both data privacy and query privacy. Specifically, we first formalize the models of privacy-preserving ARkNN queries and propose our BARQ scheme based on a random response (RR) frequency oracle. Then, we design a privacy-preserving hardware-assisted reverse kNN query determination (PRkD) scheme for privately determining whether a query record is among the RkNN of a data record. After that, we present our EARQ scheme by leveraging the PRkD scheme to protect query privacy and integrating the RR frequency oracle to protect data privacy. In addition, our rigorous security analysis demonstrates that the BARQ scheme can well protect data privacy, and the EARQ scheme can protect both data privacy and query privacy. Extensive experimental results illustrate that they have high accuracy in query results and are efficient in computational costs and communication overheads.

Distributed key-value stores are rapidly evolving to serve the needs of high-performance web services and large-scale cloud computing applications. It is desirable to search directly over an encrypted key value (KV) store, as data is increasingly stored in the cloud. Encrypted, distributed and searchable key- value stores have been the focus of research, where a data owner outsources his key-value store to a remote server in the cloud in the encrypted form, yet still keeping it searchable. In this paper, we explore the encrypted KV store with the secure multi-client query support. In particular, the data owner can authorize multiple trustable clients (third parties) and allow them to search its encrypted database over KV store. The design goal is to ensure the data confidentiality and query privacy. From the data owner's perspective, the authorized query should not leak too much information thus causing threats to its private database. From clients' perspective, they have the explicit requirement that the query values should not be exposed to the data owner. We design two encryption schemes and token generation methods to satisfy different requirements. To validate the effciency of our protocols, we implement the system prototype to evaluate their performance.

Blockchain based hierarchical semi-decentralized approach using IPFS for secure and efficient data sharing

BackgroundResearchers have increasingly adopted AI and next-generation sequencing (NGS), revolutionizing genomics and high-throughput screening (HTS), and transforming our understanding of cellular processes and disease mechanisms. However, these advancements generate vast datasets requiring effective data stewardship and curation practices to maintain data integrity, privacy, and accessibility. This review consolidates existing knowledge on key aspects, including data governance, quality management, privacy measures, ownership, access control, accountability, traceability, curation frameworks, and storage systems.MethodsWe conducted a systematic literature search up to January 10, 2024, across PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Scopus, and additional scholarly platforms to examine recent advances and challenges in managing the vast and complex datasets generated by these technologies. Our search strategy employed structured keyword queries focused on four key thematic areas: data governance and management, curation frameworks, algorithmic bias and fairness, and data storage, all within the context of AI applications in genomics and microscopy. Using a realist synthesis methodology, we integrated insights from diverse frameworks to explore the multifaceted challenges associated with data stewardship in these domains. Three independent reviewers, who systematically categorized the information across critical themes, including data governance, quality management, security, privacy, ownership, and access control conducted data extraction and analysis. The study also examined specific AI considerations, such as algorithmic bias, model explainability, and the application of advanced cryptographic techniques. The review process included six stages, starting with an extensive search across multiple research databases, resulting in 273 documents. Screening based on broad criteria, titles, abstracts, and full texts followed this, narrowing the pool to 38 highly relevant citations.ResultsOur findings indicated that significant research was conducted in 2023 by highlighting the increasing recognition of robust data governance frameworks in AI-driven genomics and microscopy. While 36 articles extensively discussed data interoperability and sharing, AI-model explain ability and data augmentation remained underexplored, indicating significant gaps. The integration of diverse data types—ranging from sequencing and clinical data to proteomic and imaging data—highlighted the complexity and expansive scope of AI applications in these fields. The current challenges identified in AI-based data stewardship and curation practices are lack of infrastructure and cost optimization, ethical and privacy considerations, access control and sharing mechanisms, large scale data handling and analysis and transparent data-sharing policies and practice. Proposed solutions to address issues related to data quality, privacy, and bias management include advanced cryptographic techniques, federated learning, and blockchain technology. Robust data governance measures, such as GA4GH standards, DUO versioning, and attribute-based access control, are essential for ensuring data integrity, security, and ethical use. The study also emphasized the critical role of Data Management Plans (DMPs), meticulous metadata curation, and advanced cryptographic techniques in mitigating risks related to data security and identifiability. Despite advancements, significant challenges persisted in balancing data ownership with research accessibility, integrating heterogeneous data sources, ensuring platform interoperability, and maintaining data quality. Ongoing risks of unauthorized access and data breaches underscored the need for continuous innovation in data management practices and stricter adherence to legal and ethical standards.ConclusionsThese findings explored the current practices and challenges in data stewardship, offering a roadmap for strengthening the governance, security, and ethical use of AI in genomics and microscopy. While robust governance frameworks and ethical practices have established a foundation for data integrity and transparency, there remains an urgent need for collaborative efforts to develop interoperable platforms and transparent data-sharing policies. Additionally, evolving legal and ethical frameworks will be crucial to addressing emerging challenges posed by AI technologies. Fostering transparency, accountability, and ethical responsibility within the research community will be key to ensuring trust and driving ethically sound scientific advancements.

Anonymous and linkable ring signcryption scheme for location-based services in VANETs

Within the context of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), interorganizational collaboration and data interchange enable enhanced data analytics and extraction. The joint data mining yields improved data access, analytical precision, and uncovers concealed patterns. However, during the process of joint data mining, there are data privacy concerns such as data leakage and misuse, necessitating the protection of data privacy. In this article, we propose a secure multiparty computation (MPC) approach, aiming to achieve the separation of data ownership and usage which ensures that multiple parties can perform computations without revealing sensitive inputs. Additionally, we utilize Beaver triples to reduce polynomial degrees and lower communication costs. Furthermore, we demonstrate consistency checks and computation verification to attest to the result consistency and data confidentiality under the semihonest adversary model. When evaluated with 20 parties on an Intel i7-10700 CPU, a single 128-bit field multiplication transmits 2.6 KB and completes in 21 ms over a 1 Mbps link. Even at 500 parties the budget remains 62.6 kB (490 ms). Compared with six representative MPC and homomorphic schemes, the proposed design achieves the lowest overall communication cost and competitive computation time. Integrated into a privacy-preserving DBSCAN implementation, the framework clusters 1000 2-D points with plaintext-level accuracy in millisecond-level, demonstrating practical applicability to multisource data mining.

SM algorithms-based encryption scheme for large genomic data files

Background: Personalized medicine is one of the health treatment approaches that has developed in the last ten years. This treatment is specific because it considers the genomics of patients and requires a complete database or medical record covering clinical and genomic data. Nevertheless, there are ethical and legal challenges in the implementation of electronic medical records in personalized medicine.Objective: This study aimed to determine the ethical and legal challenges in the use of electronic medical records in personalized medicine based on previous literature.Methods: The method used in this study was literature review with sources from journals, books, and articles on electronic medical records, personalized medicine, as well as legal and ethical aspects related both domestically and abroad. Results: Ethical and legal challenges that can occurred in the use of electronic medical records in the personalized medicine era include security and ownership of data, legal responsibility, genomic discrimination, and changes in the relationship between doctors and patients.Conclusion: Indonesia does not yet have specific regulations regarding data security, data ownership, and data sharing in the health sector. Further regulations regarding the use of electronic medical records in the personalized era are needed so that their implementation does not conflict with the ethics and laws that apply in Indonesia

JCDC: A blockchain-based framework for secure data storage and circulation in JointCloud

The significance of the cloud enables the data owners (DOs) to store data remotely in cloud server (CS). The external and internal attacks on the stored data at CS can deliberately remove data. Furthermore, the CS removes the stored data to make empty location for the user's upcoming new data. However, it is a legal expectation of DOs to know whether their data are correctly stored or altered in CS. In this article, we propose a novel privacy-aware and hash-parity-bits-based public auditing (PA-HPPA) framework to secure full data, left half of the data, and the right half of the data, generated by a DO. DO generates two private key pairs with the assistance of a virtual key and a user ID (IP). The virtual key is the sequence number of DO who is registered and provided by the trusted data manager (TDM) while IP is the sequence number of DO working in an organization. Subsequently, DO blinds the categorized data and generates their signatures and hashes. In addition, DO generates the parity bits using xor and assigns to each hard drive (HD) in CS, which assistants to TDM in public auditing. Second, how to identify the error in the stored data and how to securely recover the error/missed data? Extension to the framework, the novel proposed data error identification and secure data recovery produce tags for installed HDs of CS using truth table and recover the altered/missed data via a authenticator, which is produced using xor function. Third, how to protect a valid user from revocation and, in case a user has revoked on merit basis, then how to securely access the stored data of it? This novel work has proposed three conditions to meet the validity of the valid user from revocation and securely generating the public-private key pairs to access the stored data of the revoked user securely from CS. Fourth, there is an efficient novel proposed dynamic operation scheme to insert, update, or delete the stored data at CS without regenerating the signatures, hashes, and tags for the whole stored data in cloud. The security analysis and the performance evaluation of the proposed solutions are provably efficient and secure with reduced communication costs.

Data is increasing drastically day by day specifically due to the usage of social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. It is very difficult for data owners to store and manipulate such a huge size of data as it incurs more cost of maintaining resources. To overcome this issue, data owners utilize cloud resources to limit the expenses. But as a third party, the cloud can be curious which may lead to the disclosure of personal data. This led researchers to use some techniques to provide privacy in cloud storage used by data owners and this is referred to as privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM). PPDM preserves the privacy of data owners in the cloud, so the private data remains private even after the mining process. This paper focuses on some of the important PPDM techniques like data distortion, encryption, etc. It brings out an extensive survey of privacy-preserving data mining techniques, their benefits and drawbacks, and put forth the open challenges for further research.

Taking a byte out of big data

Privacy-preserving data publishing addresses the problem of disclosing sensitive data when mining for useful information. Among the existing privacy models, e-differential privacy provides one of the strongest privacy guarantees. In this paper, we address the problem of private data publishing where data is horizontally divided among two parties over the same set of attributes. In particular, we present the first generalization-based algorithm for differentially private data release for horizontally-partitioned data between two parties in the semi-honest adversary model. The generalization algorithm correctly releases differentially-private data and protects the privacy of each party according to the definition of secure multi-party computation. To achieve this, we first present a two-party protocol for the exponential mechanism. This protocol can be used as a subprotocol by any other algorithm that requires exponential mechanism in a distributed setting. Experimental results on real-life data suggest that the proposed algorithm can effectively preserve information for a data mining task.

The framework of Input and Output Privacy aids in conceptualization of data privacy protections, providing considerations for situations where multiple parties are collaborating in a compute system (Input Privacy) as well as considerations when releasing data from a compute process (Output Privacy). Similar frameworks for conceptualization of privacy protections at a systems design level are lacking within the Artificial Intelligence space, which can lead to mischaracterizations and incorrect implementations of privacy protections. In this paper, we apply the Input and Output Privacy framework to Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, establishing parallels between traditional data systems and newer AI systems to help privacy professionals and AI developers and deployers conceptualize and determine the places in those systems where privacy protections have the greatest effect. We discuss why the Input and Output Privacy framework is useful when evaluating privacy protections for AI systems, examine the similarities and differences of Input and Output privacy between traditional data systems and AI systems, and provide considerations on how to protect Input and Output Privacy for systems utilizing AI models. This framework offers developers and deployers of AI systems common ground for conceptualizing where and how privacy protections can be applied in their systems and for minimizing risk of misaligned implementations of privacy protection.