YACL Talk | Feb 21, 11:00am | Kirill Nikitin (Columbia University, NY Genome Center) - Private Information Leakage from Polygenic Risk Scores
Aviv Yaish
When: Friday (Feb 21), 11:00-noon
Where: AKW200, Arthur K. Watson Hall, 51 Prospect St, New Haven, CT 06511, US
Speaker: Kirill Nikitin (Columbia University, NY Genome Center)
Title: Private Information Leakage from Polygenic Risk Scores
Abstract: Polygenic Risk Scores (PRSs) estimate the likelihood of individuals to develop diseases based on their genetic variations. They are commonly considered non-sensitive information and are publicly shared with results of clinical studies or on health forums. In this talk, I will describe how PRSs can be exploited to recover genotypes of individuals and to de-anonymize them. By framing genotype recovery as the subset-sum problem with side information from population statistics, we show that it is possible to reconstruct a significant portion of an individual’s genome from their individual PRS values with 95% accuracy. Even imperfect recovery is then sufficient to identify the individual or their relatives in genealogy databases or public anonymized biobanks.
Bio: Kirill Nikitin is a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center working with Gamze Gürsoy on analyzing privacy leakages from genomic data. Previously, he worked as a postdoc with Vitaly Shmatikov at Cornell Tech, and he received his PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from EPFL, where he was advised by Bryan Ford. Besides genomics privacy, he has worked on metadata protection in encrypted files and communication, private information retrieval, security of software-update systems, and blockchains. Personal website: https://nikirill.com
Livestream: https://yale.zoom.us/j/95675487478?pwd=raLqCdaTm1Q7r8Xi59Qi2zJ8YiRzY6.1 (Password: 233157, Telephone：203-432-9666 or 646 568 7788)
More: For additional details about the talk and our seminar, see our website: https://sites.google.com/view/yacl