Crypto Beacon

Beacon of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is an important international platform for sharing genetic variants. The Beacon search is described as follows: a user sends a pair consisting of a genomic position and an allele (e.g., Chr21:122211 and ‘A’) to a server, and the server returns only a binary response “yes” or “no” to let the user know whether or not the variant exists in the database. This simple search enables global discovery of the genetic variants and facilitates the sharing of the genomic data resources from various cohort studies. Since the Beacon query often includes private information (such as patient’s genomic variant), there is a need to protect query privacy. We introduce a novel search system called Crypto Beacon which enables the user to hide the query from the server while successfully obtaining the results. In our system, the query is encrypted on the user’s browser; the server conducts the search without decrypting the query and returns the encrypted result. Only the user can decrypt the result, i.e., our system ensures that the server never monitors the user’s query. Hence, the user can send a sensitive query in full privacy. The encryption is done by using a cryptographic technique, called homomorphic encryption, which enables the addition/multiplication in the encrypted space.

Background and Results

See the poster at ISMB 2019