Enabling the Efficient, Dependable Cloud-Based Storage of Human Genomes

Abstract

Efficiently storing large data sets of human genomes is a long-term ambition from both the research and clinical life sciences communities. For instance, biobanks stock thousands to millions of biological physical samples and have been under pressure to store also their resulting digitized genomes. However, these and other life sciences institutions lack the infrastructure and expertise to efficiently store this data. Cloud computing is a natural economic alternative to private infrastructures, but it is not as good an alternative in terms of security and privacy. In this work, we present an end-to-end composite pipeline intended to enable the efficient, dependable cloud-based storage of human genomes by integrating three mechanisms we have recently proposed. These mechanisms encompass (1) a privacy-sensitivity detector for human genomes, (2) a similarity-based deduplication and delta-encoding algorithm for sequencing data, and (3) an auditability scheme to verify who has effectively read data in storage systems that use secure information dispersal. By integrating them with appropriate storage configurations, one can obtain reasonable privacy protection, security, and dependability guarantees at modest costs (e.g., less than $1/Genome/Year). Our preliminary analysis indicates that this pipeline costs only 3% more than non-replicated systems, 48% less than fully-replicating all data, and 31% less than secure information dispersal schemes.