A Web-Based Application for the Secure Transfer of NGS data

Abstract: During the last decade, the use of Next-Generation Sequencing(NGS) technologies has sky-rocketed. The vast amount of data produced by these platforms require processing and analysis. This is usually performed at locations remote from the sequencing facilities thereby introducing the need for data-transportation to the place of analysis. The use of internet transfer would greatly facilitate the process, however since NGS data is considered to be personal sensitive information the handling of the data is highly regulated by the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR). During this project, a web-based application was developed for the privacy-protecting transfer of personal sensitive data, implementing an in-motion encryption scheme which ensures data integrity and authenticity. The application consists of three scripts: the HTML web page with JavaScript functionality, a PHP script responsible for connection establishment and integrity verification, and a Python script executing the majority of the server-side operations. The resulting application uses the symmetric encryption algorithm AES in GCM mode, using a key size of 128 bits and transfers 60 Kibibytes of the file at a time. The key is established by using the asymmetric RSA encryption scheme with a 4096 bit key pair. SHA-256 is used for verifying the integrity of the transferred files. The JavaScript encryption speed is 584 MB/s and the Python decryption speed 251 MB/s. While the focus of the project was to optimize the application for NGS data, it is not limited to this type of file and can transfer different formats, enabling the use in multiple different fields.