A public permissionless complement to federated genomic networks

Give patients their data

Transfer custody of a patient's raw genomic data to them via a specialized third party service or a purpose built hardware device with secure enclave they connect to their home wifi.

Public Attestations

ZK Cryptography

Researchers use an IDE to create inquiries that run within a Zero Knowledge (ZK) virtual machine. In practice these inquiries are functions that accept an array of requested alleles and phenotypes as parameters, performs arbitrary computation and return a result.

pub fn predict(
    &self, 
    snp_data: &[SnpData],
    hpo_codes: Option<&[&str]>
) -> Result<InquiryResult, InquiryError> {
    
    let mut hpo_match = false;
    let mut hpo_confidence = 0.0;

    for model in &self.snp_models {
        ...
    }

    Ok(InquiryResult {
        hpo_match,
        hpo_confidence,
    })
}

The researcher publishes their compiled inquiry alongside metadata identifying them, their institution and a description of the inquiry in order to obtain informed consent from a patient.

The researcher may choose to limit inquiry responses to patients whose data has been attested to by one or more trusted sources.

A patient's hardware device detects the newly published inquiry and notifies the patient's smart phone that they are eligible to respond.

The patient reviews the details of the inquiry, assisted by software that helps them understand the privacy implications and checks a global registry to verify the identity of the researcher.

If the patient consents, their hardware device executes the inquiry and transmits the results along with a Zero Knowledge Proof back to the researcher, using fully encrypted peer-to-peer technology.

When a researcher receives a response, the provided Zero Knowledge proof is verified. This verification guarantees that the patients hardware ran the inquiry program correctly using data threat originated from one of trusted institutions.

Notably, verification does not reveal identifiers that link a patient across inquiries, nor does it reveal which institution the data originated from, nor when the data was created. It does however prevent patients from submitting duplicate responses.