imstilla.grandma
Believer of Miracles
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2018
- Messages
- 30,930
- Reaction score
- 210,603
You know, this is crazy serious stuff going down all around us. I’m surprised this thread isn’t more active. George Orwell/1984/Big Brother anyone? I guess most of y’all are too young...I’ve snipped some key links from a current article to get myself acclimated to the thread. I saw right away something went sideways somewhere in the thread so I’m anxious to settle down into the mix. All I can say for sure right now is - Everyone, dead or alive, deserves a voice.
Security flaws in the service, called GEDmatch, not only risk exposing people’s genetic health information but could let an adversary such as China or Russia create a powerful biometric database useful for identifying nearly any American from a DNA sample.
Ney, along with professors and DNA security researchers Luis Ceze and Tadayoshi Kohno, described in a reportposted online how they developed and tested a novel attack employing DNA data they uploaded to GEDmatch.
As the site grew, it drew the attention of police investigators. In 2017, police in California announced they had used the database, without Rogers' knowledge, to help identify a murderer known as the Golden State Killer. Police did it by uploading DNA data extracted from crime-scene evidence and comparing it with users’ data to identify some of his relatives.
Since then, dozens of murderers and rapists have been identifiedusing GEDmatch. But a privacy debate erupted as well, partly because police had searched users’ DNA without their knowledge. In response, Rogers allowed users to opt in or out of police searches, or just delete their profiles.
With the million or so profiles in the database, most Americans have second or third cousins in it, says Doc Edge, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, who last week posted the first papershowing how ancestry databases could be vulnerable to a clever searcher.
GEDMatch, run out of a house in Lake Worth, Florida, is small business whose aim is genealogy and education, not profits, says Rogers. He acknowledged that its team of five part-time volunteers would not have the resources to hire security consultants.
The DNA database used to find the Golden State Killer is a national security leak waiting to happen
Security flaws in the service, called GEDmatch, not only risk exposing people’s genetic health information but could let an adversary such as China or Russia create a powerful biometric database useful for identifying nearly any American from a DNA sample.
Ney, along with professors and DNA security researchers Luis Ceze and Tadayoshi Kohno, described in a reportposted online how they developed and tested a novel attack employing DNA data they uploaded to GEDmatch.
As the site grew, it drew the attention of police investigators. In 2017, police in California announced they had used the database, without Rogers' knowledge, to help identify a murderer known as the Golden State Killer. Police did it by uploading DNA data extracted from crime-scene evidence and comparing it with users’ data to identify some of his relatives.
Since then, dozens of murderers and rapists have been identifiedusing GEDmatch. But a privacy debate erupted as well, partly because police had searched users’ DNA without their knowledge. In response, Rogers allowed users to opt in or out of police searches, or just delete their profiles.
With the million or so profiles in the database, most Americans have second or third cousins in it, says Doc Edge, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, who last week posted the first papershowing how ancestry databases could be vulnerable to a clever searcher.
GEDMatch, run out of a house in Lake Worth, Florida, is small business whose aim is genealogy and education, not profits, says Rogers. He acknowledged that its team of five part-time volunteers would not have the resources to hire security consultants.
The DNA database used to find the Golden State Killer is a national security leak waiting to happen
