Privacy Threat Modeling for Emerging BiobankClouds

There is an increased amount of data produced by next generation sequencing (NGS) machines which demand scalable storage and analysis of genomic data. In order to cope with this huge amount of information, many biobanks are interested in cloud computing capabilities such as on-demand elasticity of computing power and storage capacity. There are several security and privacy requirements mandated by personal data protection legislation which hinder biobanks from migrating big data generated by the NGS machines. This paper describes the privacy requirements of platform-as-service BiobankClouds according to the European Data Protection Directive (DPD). It identifies several key privacy threats which leave BiobankClouds vulnerable to an attack. This study benefits health-care application designers in the requirement elicitation cycle when building privacy-preserving BiobankCloud platforms.