Privacy in the Genomic Era

Genome sequencing technology has advanced at a rapid pace and it is now possible to generate highly-detailed genotypes inexpensively. The collection and analysis of such data has the potential to support various applications, including personalized medical services. While the benefits of the genomics revolution are trumpeted by the biomedical community, the increased availability of such data has major implications for personal privacy; notably because the genome has certain essential features, which include (but are not limited to) (i) an association with traits and certain diseases, (ii) identification capability (e.g., forensics), and (iii) revelation of family relationships. Moreover, direct-to-consumer DNA testing increases the likelihood that genome data will be made available in less regulated environments, such as the Internet and for-profit companies. The problem of genome data privacy thus resides at the crossroads of computer science, medicine, and public policy. While the computer scientists have addressed data privacy for various data types, there has been less attention dedicated to genomic data. Thus, the goal of this paper is to provide a systematization of knowledge for the computer science community. In doing so, we address some of the (sometimes erroneous) beliefs of this field and we report on a survey we conducted about genome data privacy with biomedical specialists. Then, after characterizing the genome privacy problem, we review the state-of-the-art regarding privacy attacks on genomic data and strategies for mitigating such attacks, as well as contextualizing these attacks from the perspective of medicine and public policy. This paper concludes with an enumeration of the challenges for genome data privacy and presents a framework to systematize the analysis of threats and the design of countermeasures as the field moves forward

Security and Privacy for Green IoT-based Agriculture: Review, Blockchain solutions, and Challenges

open access articleThis paper presents research challenges on security and privacy issues in the field of green IoT-based agriculture. We start by describing a four-tier green IoT-based agriculture architecture and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with smart agriculture. Then, we provide a classification of threat models against green IoT-based agriculture into five categories, including, attacks against privacy, authentication, confidentiality, availability, and integrity properties. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving technologies for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. In addition, we analyze the privacy-oriented blockchain-based solutions as well as consensus algorithms for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the security and privacy of green IoT-based agriculture

When the Hammer Meets the Nail: Multi-Server PIR for Database-Driven CRN with Location Privacy Assurance

We show that it is possible to achieve information theoretic location privacy for secondary users (SUs) in database-driven cognitive radio networks (CRNs) with an end-to-end delay less than a second, which is significantly better than that of the existing alternatives offering only a computational privacy. This is achieved based on a keen observation that, by the requirement of Federal Communications Commission (FCC), all certified spectrum databases synchronize their records. Hence, the same copy of spectrum database is available through multiple (distinct) providers. We harness the synergy between multi-server private information retrieval (PIR) and database- driven CRN architecture to offer an optimal level of privacy with high efficiency by exploiting this observation. We demonstrated, analytically and experimentally with deployments on actual cloud systems that, our adaptations of multi-server PIR outperform that of the (currently) fastest single-server PIR by a magnitude of times with information theoretic security, collusion resiliency, and fault-tolerance features. Our analysis indicates that multi-server PIR is an ideal cryptographic tool to provide location privacy in database-driven CRNs, in which the requirement of replicated databases is a natural part of the system architecture, and therefore SUs can enjoy all advantages of multi-server PIR without any additional architectural and deployment costs.Comment: 10 pages, double colum

Achieving cybersecurity in blockchain-based systems: a survey

With The Increase In Connectivity, The Popularization Of Cloud Services, And The Rise Of The Internet Of Things (Iot), Decentralized Approaches For Trust Management Are Gaining Momentum. Since Blockchain Technologies Provide A Distributed Ledger, They Are Receiving Massive Attention From The Research Community In Different Application Fields. However, This Technology Does Not Provide With Cybersecurity By Itself. Thus, This Survey Aims To Provide With A Comprehensive Review Of Techniques And Elements That Have Been Proposed To Achieve Cybersecurity In Blockchain-Based Systems. The Analysis Is Intended To Target Area Researchers, Cybersecurity Specialists And Blockchain Developers. For This Purpose, We Analyze 272 Papers From 2013 To 2020 And 128 Industrial Applications. We Summarize The Lessons Learned And Identify Several Matters To Foster Further Research In This AreaThis work has been partially funded by MINECO, Spain grantsTIN2016-79095-C2-2-R (SMOG-DEV) and PID2019-111429RB-C21 (ODIO-COW); by CAM, Spain grants S2013/ICE-3095 (CIBERDINE),P2018/TCS-4566 (CYNAMON), co-funded by European Structural Funds (ESF and FEDER); by UC3M-CAM grant CAVTIONS-CM-UC3M; by the Excellence Program for University Researchers, Spain; and by Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Spain under the project LINKA20216 (“Advancing in cybersecurity technologies”, i-LINK+ program)