A system capable of verifiably and privately screening global DNA synthesis
<|reference_start|>A system capable of verifiably and privately screening global DNA synthesis: Printing custom DNA sequences is essential to scientific and biomedical research, but the technology can be used to manufacture plagues as well as cures. Just as ink printers recognize and reject attempts to counterfeit money, DNA synthesizers and assemblers should deny unauthorized requests to make viral DNA that could be used to ignite a pandemic. There are three complications. First, we don't need to quickly update printers to deal with newly discovered currencies, whereas we regularly learn of new viruses and other biological threats. Second, anti-counterfeiting specifications on a local printer can't be extracted and misused by malicious actors, unlike information on biological threats. Finally, any screening must keep the inspected DNA sequences private, as they may constitute valuable trade secrets. Here we describe SecureDNA, a free, privacy-preserving, and fully automated system capable of verifiably screening all DNA synthesis orders of 30+ base pairs against an up-to-date database of hazards, and its operational performance and specificity when applied to 67 million base pairs of DNA synthesized by providers in the United States, Europe, and China.<|reference_end|>
@article{baum2024a,
    title={A system capable of verifiably and privately screening global DNA
  synthesis},
    author={Carsten Baum (1 and 2), Jens Berlips (3), Walther Chen (3), Hongrui
  Cui (4), Ivan Damgard (1), Jiangbin Dong (5), Kevin M. Esvelt (3 and 6),
  Leonard Foner (3), Mingyu Gao (5 and 12), Dana Gretton (3 and 6), Martin
  Kysel (3), Juanru Li (4), Xiang Li (5), Omer Paneth (7), Ronald L. Rivest
  (7), Francesca Sage-Ling (3), Adi Shamir (8), Yue Shen (10), Meicen Sun (11),
  Vinod Vaikuntanathan (7), Lynn Van Hauwe (3), Theia Vogel (3), Benjamin
  Weinstein-Raun (3), Yun Wang (10), Daniel Wichs (9), Stephen Wooster (3),
  Andrew C. Yao (3 and 5 and 12), Yu Yu (4 and 12), Haoling Zhang (10), and
  Kaiyi Zhang (4) ((1) Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University,
  Denmark, (2) DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark, (3)
  SecureDNA Foundation, Switzerland, (4) Department of Computer Science and
  Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, (5) Institute for
  Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, China, (6) Media
  Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, (7) Computer Science and
  Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
  USA, (8) Department of Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science,
  Israel, (9) Department of Computer Science, Northeastern University, USA,
  (10) China National GeneBank, China, (11) Department of Political Science,
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, (12) Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute,
  China)},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.14023},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.14023},
    primaryClass={cs.CR}
}