Sandia Labs Find Vulnerability in Personalized Medicine Software https://healthitsecurity.com/news/sandia-labs-find-vulnerability-in-personalized-medicine-software

July 05, 2019 - Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have discovered a vulnerability in personalized medicine software used for genomic analysis.

The vulnerability could open DNA-based medical diagnostic tools to a “man-in-the-middle” attack, in which a hacker intercepts communication between two parties either to eavesdrop or modify communications between them.

In this case, the two parties are a remote government server with standardized human genome data and a user of the Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) program, which is popular among personalized genomics researchers.

Sandia Labs explained that personalized genomics research involves a two-step process: sequencing the entire genetic content from a patient’s cells and comparing that sequence to a standardized human genome. By comparing those results, physicians can identify genetic changes in a patient that are linked to a particular disease. The researchers found the vulnerability at the point where the BWA program imports the standardized genome from government servers, resulting in the sequence traveling over insecure communications channels.

Weapons lab to develop Celera's new supercomputer - https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-spotlight-20010126-01

Published: 26 January 2001

LONDON Craig Venter, the CEO of Celera Genomics - which is on the verge of publishing the sequence of the human genome - has signed an agreement with Sandia National Laboratory in the US to develop the most powerful computer in the world within four years - and it'll be used for biology.

At the same time, Sandia will be working on a similar machine to simulate the full three-dimensional impact of a nuclear weapons explosion, due for delivery to the US government by 2004. Sandia National Laboratory is a US Department of Energylaboratory, owned by the DoE but operated by the Sandia corporation. It is one of the three US weapons laboratories using supercomputers for the government's 'stockpile stewardship programme', which ensures the safety and reliability of the US nuclear stockpile in the absence of nuclear testing.

"The assembly of the human genome last June took 20,000 hours of central processing unit time" Venter said at the announcement of the agreement in Washington on 19 January. But to take the research further, "even though we have one of the biggest computers outside government," it had become clear that the biggest limitation would be computer power. And, said Venter, Celera has found the expertise it needs - in Sandia together with the personal computer company Compaq. Compaq has already made a name for itself in biological supercomputing. It bought Digital Equipment Corporation - with its alpha chip technology - two years ago and provided the computers for the Celera human genome work.

According to Sandia's President, Paul Robinson, "we in the nuclear weapons community felt for many years that nothing could be more complex than nuclear physics and weapons... But I'm now convinced that nothing equals the complexity of bioscience and the human genome, and the challenges ahead. It's really important for us to have an opportunity to participate in this exciting work."

The director of the Celera project at Sandia, Grant Heffelfinger, echoes this. "It's tremendously exciting. It's the opportunity of a lifetime. It's like physics in the 1920s. Like the dawn of quantum mechanics. All of the fundamental questions are being challenged and assailed, we're just beginning to have some of the capacity to find the answers, and we find that the more you learn we see how much there is to know and how profound the answers are going to be."