Towards preserving privacy of outsourced genomic data over the cloud

Genomic data holds sensitive information such as ancestry information as well as the information regarding the tendencies to particular diseases. Such privileged information should not be revealed to an unauthorized user as it can be abused. Now a day, it is quite common to outsource genomic data for the purpose of accelerating genomic research. In this paper, we proposed a method to protect genomic data privacy, using Paillier cryptosystem and order preserving encryption (OPE). The proposed scheme has been evaluated using performance and security analysis. The results reveal that there is some performance overhead, however, the leakage of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) is controlled, which was a problem in existing privacy-preserving schemes for genomic data. We have also compared our approach with existing technique and the compared the percentage of leakage of SNPs, which are out of requested range. In existing techniques, the whole short read is returned, in which requested range falls. So all those SNPs, which are not in requested range would be considered as leaked SNPs.