Graduate student Peter Rindal was on the winning team at an international computer security competition hosted by iDASH, a National Center for Biomedical Computing. The team members were interns and postdocs at Microsoft Research competing against seven other groups from around the world to win the “Secure Outsourcing” challenge.

“The competition pushed us to develop promising new research and brought us together with people in healthcare who want to see this technology in the real world,” Rindal said.

The goal of the competition was to advance the state-of-the-art for research on information privacy for genetic data. An application of their project could be secure cloud storage for medical data so patients and doctors could query data without revealing sensitive information to the cloud (e.g., predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease).

Specifically, the group calculated the probability of genetic diseases through matching a set of biomarkers to encrypted genomes stored in a commercial cloud service. The matching was carried out using a process called homomorphic encryption, which leaves no trace of the computation, so that only the patient and doctors can learn the answer to the question.