Speaker:  Dr. Erman Ayday

Title:
Genomic Privacy: Threats, Challenges, and Solutions

Abstract:
Genomics is becoming the next significant challenge for privacy. The price of a complete genome profile has plummeted below $100 for genome-wide genotyping (i.e., the characterization of about one million common genetic variants) and is offered by a number of companies. This low cost of DNA sequencing will break the physician/patient connection and it can open the door to all kinds of abuse, not yet fully understood. Access to genomic data prompts some important privacy concerns: (i) DNA reflects information about genetic conditions and  predispositions to  specific diseases such as  Alzheimer’s, cancer, or schizophrenia, (ii) DNA contains information about ancestors, siblings, and progeny, (iii) DNA (almost) does not change over time, hence revoking or replacing it (as with other forms of identification) is impossible, and (iv) DNA analysis is already being used both in law enforcement and healthcare, thus prompting numerous ethical issues. Such issues could lead to abuse, threats, and genetic discrimination. As pointed out by author Rebecca Skloot, "the view we have today of genomes is like a world map, but Google Street View is coming very soon." This growing precision can be highly beneficial in terms of personalized medicine, but it can have devastating consequences on individuals’ peace of mind.

In this talk, after discussing the threats and challenges of genomic privacy, Dr. Ayday will briefly summarize our cryptographic solutions to protect the privacy of genomic data. In the remaining portion of the talk, he will focus on quantification and protection of kin genomic privacy, using information theoretical tools and non-cryptographic techniques. First, he will show how vulnerable the genomic privacy of individuals is due to genomic data shared by their relatives and data available on online social networks. That is, it will be shown how genomic data of family members can be efficiently inferred using data publicly shared by other relatives and background knowledge on genomics. For this, he proposes an algorithm to model such an attack using (i) available genomic data of a subset of family members, (ii) statistical relationships (correlations) between the nucleotides on the DNA, and (iii) publicly known genomic background. For the efficiency of such an algorithm, he represents this attack as an inference problem (to infer the unknown nucleotides of the family members from the available data). Dr. Ayday will model the familial relationships, nucleotides on the DNA, and the correlations between the nucleotides on a factor graph and use the belief propagation algorithm to efficiently infer the unknown nucleotides on the factor graph via message passing. To quantify the level of genomic privacy as a result of the proposed attack, Dr. Ayday will discuss possible definitions of genomic and health privacy metrics. Then, he will show how this attack threatens the real users who share genomic data on the Internet. Finally, he will present a non-cryptographic mechanism that enables public availability of genomic data for research, and, at the same time, protects the genomic privacy of the individuals in a family. The results show that the proposed technique efficiently maximizes the utility for genomic research, while satisfying all family members' privacy requirements. In other words, this technique lets genomic research and genomic privacy walk hand-in-hand. 

More information about activities on this topic can be found here. 

Bio:
Erman Ayday is a post-doctoral researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in the Laboratory for Communications and Applications 1 (LCA1) led by Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Tech Information Processing, Communications and Security Research Lab (IPCAS) in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, in 2007 and 2011, respectively, under the supervision of Dr. Faramarz Fekri. He received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2005. 

Erman's research interests include privacy enhancing algorithms, wireless network security, game theory for wireless networks, trust and reputation management, and recommender systems. Erman Ayday is the recipient of 2010 Outstanding Research Award from the Center of Signal and Image Processing (CSIP) at Georgia Tech and 2011 ECE Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) Excellence Award from Georgia Tech. He is a member of the IEEE and the ACM.

Job Posting for post-doctoral positions and internships at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland:
EPFL/LCA1 (Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux) is recruiting two post-doctoral researchers and potential interns in the areas of network privacy and security, with an emphasis on mobile/wireless networks and on data privacy and security, with an emphasis on health-related data (including genomic data). Dr. Ayday would be happy to collect resumes in person and/or have informal discussions about the positions after the talk.

More information about the post-doc positions can be found here.

More information about the research activities can be found here.