Secure Similar Patients Query on Encrypted Genomic Data

Both individuals and enterprises produce genomic data rapidly and continuously. There is a need to outsource such data to the cloud for better flexibility. Outsourcing also helps data owners by eliminating the local storage management problem. To protect data privacy and security, data owners must encrypt the sensitive data before outsourcing. Since genomic data is enormous in volume, executing researchers' queries securely and efficiently is a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce an indexing algorithm based on the prefix-tree to support similar patient queries. The proposed method guarantees the following: (1) data privacy, (2) query privacy, and (3) output privacy. The privacy is guaranteed through encryption and garbled circuits considering the semi-honest adversary model. The overall computation is scalable and fast enough for real-life biomedical applications. Moreover, experimental results show that our method performs better than existing state-of-art techniques in this domain.