Cryptographic Approaches to Provacy in Forensic DNA Databases
PKC '00 Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography: Public Key Cryptography
Longest common subsequence as private search
Proceedings of the 8th ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society
Addressing the concerns of the lacks family: quantification of kin genomic privacy
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGSAC conference on Computer & communications security
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DNA analysis is increasingly used in forensics, where it is being pushed as the holy grail of identification. But we are approaching a dramatic "phase change" as we move from genetics to genomics: when sequencing the entire genome of a person becomes sufficiently cheap as to become a routine operation, as is likely to happen in the coming decades, then each DNA examination will expose a wealth of very sensitive personal information about the examined individual, as well as her relatives. In this interdisciplinary discussion paper we highlight the complexity of DNA-related privacy issues as we move into the genomic (as opposed to genetic) era: the "driftnet" approach of comparing scene-of-crime samples against the DNA of the whole population rather than just against that of chosen suspects; the potential for errors in forensic DNA analysis and the consequences on security and privacy; the civil liberties implications of the interaction between medical and forensic applications of genomics. For example, your kin can provide valuable information in a database matching procedure against you even if you don't; and being able to read the whole of a sampled genome, rather than just 13 specific markers from it, provides information about the medical and physical characteristics of the individual. Our aim is to offer a simple but thought-provoking and technically accurate summary of the many issues involved, hoping to stimulate an informed public debate on the statutes by which DNA collection, storage and processing should be regulated.