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Abstract

Nowadays, genomic sequencing has become affordable for many people. Since more people let analyze their genome, more genome data gets collected. The good side of this is that analyses on this data become possible. However, this raises privacy concerns because the genomic data uniquely identify their owner, contain sensitive information about his/her risk for getting diseases, and even sensitive information about his/her family members. In this paper, we introduce a highly efficient privacy-preserving protocol for Similar Sequence Queries (SSQs), which can be used for finding genetically similar individuals in an outsourced genomic database aggregated from data of multiple institutions. Our SSQ protocol is based on the edit distance approximation by Asharov et al. (PETS'18), which we extend to the outsourcing scenario. We also improve their protocol by using more efficient building blocks and achieve a 5-6× run-time improvement compared to their work in the two-party scenario. Recently, Cheng et al. (ASIACCS'18) introduced protocols for outsourced SSQs that rely on homomorphic encryption. Our approach outperforms theirs by more than factor 20000× in terms of run-time in the outsourcing scenario.