SAFETY: Secure gwAs in Federated Environment Through a hYbrid solution with Intel SGX and Homomorphic Encryption

TL;DR

SAFETY is a hybrid framework combining homomorphic encryption and Intel SGX to perform privacy-preserving genome-wide association studies efficiently in a federated environment, addressing cross-border data sharing challenges.

Contribution

This paper introduces SAFETY, the first hybrid approach integrating homomorphic encryption and Intel SGX for secure GWAS in federated settings.

Findings

SAFETY is up to 4.82 times faster than existing secure computation methods.

The hybrid framework effectively balances privacy and efficiency in federated GWAS.

Experimental results demonstrate SAFETY's applicability in real-world genomic data analysis.

Abstract

Recent studies demonstrate that effective healthcare can benefit from using the human genomic information. For instance, analysis of tumor genomes has revealed 140 genes whose mutations contribute to cancer. As a result, many institutions are using statistical analysis of genomic data, which are mostly based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS). GWAS analyze genome sequence variations in order to identify genetic risk factors for diseases. These studies often require pooling data from different sources together in order to unravel statistical patterns or relationships between genetic variants and diseases. In this case, the primary challenge is to fulfill one major objective: accessing multiple genomic data repositories for collaborative research in a privacy-preserving manner. Due to the sensitivity and privacy concerns regarding the genomic data, multi-jurisdictional laws and policies of cross-border genomic data sharing are enforced among different regions of the world. In this article, we present SAFETY, a hybrid framework, which can securely perform GWAS on federated genomic datasets using homomorphic encryption and recently introduced secure hardware component of Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) to ensure high efficiency and privacy at the same time. Different experimental settings show the efficacy and applicability of such hybrid framework in secure conduction of GWAS. To the best of our knowledge, this hybrid use of homomorphic encryption along with Intel SGX is not proposed or experimented to this date. Our proposed framework, SAFETY is up to 4.82 times faster than the best existing secure computation technique.