Secure Privacy-Preserving Paternity Testing using Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Abstract

With the rise of consumer-centric genomic testing and the subsequent increase in privacy concerns regarding genomic data theft, Fully Homomorphic Encryption offers a viable approach to preserving data confidentiality while allowing computations to be performed directly on encrypted data. This study explores the possible implementation of a paternity test under FHE by developing a secure, privacypreserving system that performs the genomic computations using the CKKS encryption scheme and the TenSEAL library. Results show that using a large scaling factor such as 260 yields very high accuracy (95%-100%) however there is a slight tradeoff in the overall runtime. The system demonstrates that it is possible to perform secure genomic computations while maintaining the accuracy and privacy of sensitive genomic data.