The privacy of personal genomic data, and how much access to it is released to commercial and non commercial entities, is an important
concern. In this work, we study a specific aspect of this problem: How to determine familial, relatives relations among a large group of individuals, while keeping genomic DNA data private (or almost private). There are several commercial companies that provide such service, albeit in completely non private manner: The individual customers supply their entire genomic DNA information to these companies. We describe the moderator model, where customers keep their DNA information locally, and a central moderator matches pairs of persons who are likely to be related. These persons then engage in a secure two party computation, which checks more accurately for familial relations, and does not leak any additional information. The entire protocol leaks only a bounded amount of information to the moderator or to any other party.
22/05/2019
12.00 am, building F, 2nd floor (viale Regina Elena 295/B).
Joint work with Orit Moskovich and Benny Pinkas
Benny Chor did his B.Sc. and M.Sc. studies in mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from 1978 to 1981. He did his Ph.D. at MIT, working under the supervision of Ron Rivest on public key crypto systems, from 1981 to 1985. His Ph.D. thesis, “Two Issues in Public Key Cryptography”, was selected as an ACM Distinguished Dissertation. After completing his Ph.D., he was a Bantrell post doctorate fellow at MIT, and then a post doctorate associate at Harvard University.
Upon returning to Israel, in 1987, he served as a faculty member in the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion. In 2001, he has joined the School of Computer Science, Tel-Aviv University, where he is now a full Professor. In October 2018 he was appointed the head of the school. He has supervised (at the Technion and at Tel Aviv University) 8 Ph.D. students and 23 M.Sc. students.
He is currently interested in computational biology, in privacy, randomness, and in educational aspects of computer science, from primary school to university level. Together with Dr. Amir Rubinstein, he has recently completed the creation of an on line course, in Hebrew, titled “First Steps in Computer Science and Python Programming”.