An Efficient Method for Securely Storing and Handling of Genomic Data

Abstract

With the growth of cloud computing, genomic data is considered to be stored and processed on cloud platform. However, existing file formats to store genomic data does not guarantee the security in case of data leakage by hacker. In this paper, we therefore propose an encrypted version of the variant call format (VCF), which is one of the most widely used file formats to store genomic sequences. The encrypted variant call format (eVCF) supports a privacy preserving data processing on encrypted data and requires only few more seconds and data size than existing VCF.