LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Decentralized genomics audit logging via permissioned blockchain ledgering

Photo from wikipedia

One of the tasks in the iDASH Secure Genome Analysis Competition in 2018 was to develop blockchain-based immutable logging and querying for a cross-site genomic dataset access audit trail. The… Click to show full abstract

One of the tasks in the iDASH Secure Genome Analysis Competition in 2018 was to develop blockchain-based immutable logging and querying for a cross-site genomic dataset access audit trail. The specific challenge was to design a time/space efficient structure and mechanism of storing/retrieving genomic data access logs, based on MultiChain version 1.0.4 (https://www.multichain.com/). Our technique uses the MultiChain stream application programming interface (which affords treating MultiChain as a key value store) and employs a two-level index, which naturally supports efficient queries of the data for single clause constraints. The scheme also supports heuristic and binary search techniques for queries containing conjunctions of clause constraints, and timestamp range queries. Of note, all of our techniques have complexity independent of inserted data set size, other than the timestamp ranges, which logarithmically scale with input size. We implemented our insertion and querying techniques in Python, using the MultiChain library Savoir (https://github.com/dxmarkets/savoir), and comprehensively tested our implementation across a benchmark of datasets of varying sizes. We also tested a port of our challenge submission to a newer version of MultiChain (2.0 beta), which natively supports multiple indices. We presented creative and efficient techniques for storing and querying log file data in MultiChain 1.0.4 and 2.0 beta. We demonstrated that it is feasible to use a permissioned blockchain ledger for genomic query log data when data volume is on the order of hundreds of megabytes and query times of dozens of minutes is acceptable. We demonstrated that evolution in the ledger platform (MultiChain 1 to 2) yielded a 30%-40% increase in insertion efficiency. All source code for this challenge has been made available under a BSD-3 license from https://github.com/sandialabs/idash2018task1/.

Keywords: audit logging; multichain; genomics audit; decentralized genomics; permissioned blockchain

Journal Title: BMC Medical Genomics
Year Published: 2020

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.