How cryptography will guarantee genomic privacy

October 13, 2011

Most people in the developed world will soon be able to afford to sequence their own genome. The goal of doing this for less than $1000 should be achieved within a year with the possibility of sub-$100 genomes within 5 years, says The Physics arXiv Blog.

But your genome will reveal much about you: your risk of various diseases, your ancestral past, your phenotype, etc. So University of California, Irvine researchers have proposed ways to keep the results of certain genetic tests secret.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1110.2478: Countering GATTACA: Efficient and Secure Testing of Fully-Sequenced Human Genomes