PRINCESS

PRINCESS enables privacy-preserving distributed analysis of rare disease genetic data by using Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to perform secure computations on encrypted individual-level genomes across multiple international sites.

Key Features:

• Privacy-Preserving Computation: Employs Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to perform secure computation on encrypted data without centralizing individual-level patient DNA, protecting protected health information and supporting regulatory compliance.
• Distributed Secure Analysis: Performs distributed computations across geographically separated sites to enable collaborative research while maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of genetic datasets.
• Performance Efficiency: Demonstrated experimentally to be substantially faster than homomorphic encryption and garbled circuits, with reported performance gains exceeding 40,000-fold for secure analyses.

Scientific Applications:

• Rare disease genetic association studies: Enables secure, rapid joint analysis of distributed cohorts for identifying genetic associations in rare diseases.
• Kawasaki Disease research: Has been applied to identify genetic markers associated with Kawasaki Disease using distributed international datasets.

Methodology:

Leverages SGX-enabled hardware to compute on encrypted data and performs distributed computations across sites, with comparative performance benchmarking against homomorphic encryption and garbled circuits.