A non-interactive multi-user protocol for private authorised query processing on genomic data

This paper introduces a new non-interactive multi-user model for secure and efficient query executions on outsourced genomic data to the cloud. We instantiate this model by leveraging searchable symmetric encryption (SSE). This new construction supports various types of queries (i.e., count, Boolean, k^′ -out-of-k match queries) on encrypted genomic data, and we call it NIMUPrivGenDB. Most importantly, it eliminates the need for the data owner and/or trusted entity to be online and avoids per-query interaction between the data owner and/or trusted entity and users. This is achieved by introducing a new mechanism called QUAuth to enforce access control based on the types of queries (Q) each user (U) is authorised (Auth) to submit. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper proposing an authorisation mechanism based on queries on genomic data. Moreover, QUAuth offers user management by supporting authorisation updates. We proved that our construction achieves strong security against malicious behaviour among authorised users, where a malicious user pretends to be other users by using others’ unique IDs, and colluding attacks among these users are also considered. Finally, our proposed protocol’s implementation and evaluation demonstrate its practicality and efficiency in terms of search computational complexity and storage cost.