A system capable of verifiably and privately screening global DNA synthesis

Carsten Baum; Jens Berlips; Walther Chen; Helena Cozzarini; Hongrui Cui; Ivan Damgård; Jiangbin Dong; Kevin M. Esvelt; Leonard Foner; Mingyu Gao; Dana Gretton; Martin Kysel; Juanru Li; Xiang Li; Omer Paneth; Ronald L. Rivest; Francesca Sage-Ling; Adi Shamir; Yue Shen; Meicen Sun; Vinod Vaikuntanathan; Lynn Van Hauwe; Theia Vogel; Benjamin Weinstein-Raun; Yun Wang; Daniel Wichs; Stephen Wooster; Andrew C. Yao; Yu Yu; Haoling Zhang; Kaiyi Zhang

arXiv · 2403.14023

A system capable of verifiably and privately screening global DNA synthesis

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Abstract

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 misused. 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 potential pandemic viruses and other biological threats. Second, convincing counterfeit bills can't be printed in small pieces and taped together, while preventing the distributed synthesis and subsequent re-assembly of controlled sequences will require tracking which DNA fragments have been ordered across all providers and benchtop devices while protecting legitimate customer privacy. Finally, counterfeiting can at worst undermine faith in currency, whereas unauthorized DNA synthesis could be used to deliberately cause pandemics. Here we describe SecureDNA, a free, privacy-preserving, and fully automated system capable of verifiably screening all DNA synthesis orders of 30+ nucleotides against an up-to-date database of controlled sequences, and its operational performance and specificity when applied to 67 million nucleotides of DNA synthesized by providers in the United States, Europe, and China.

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Carsten Baum, Jens Berlips, Walther Chen, Helena Cozzarini, Hongrui Cui, Ivan Damgård, Jiangbin Dong, Kevin M. Esvelt, Leonard Foner, Mingyu Gao, Dana Gretton, Martin Kysel, Juanru Li, Xiang Li, Omer Paneth, Ronald L. Rivest, Francesca Sage-Ling, Adi Shamir, Yue Shen, Meicen Sun, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Lynn Van Hauwe, Theia Vogel, Benjamin Weinstein-Raun, Yun Wang, Daniel Wichs, Stephen Wooster, Andrew C. Yao, Yu Yu, Haoling Zhang, Kaiyi Zhang. 2025-06-30. A system capable of verifiably and privately screening global DNA synthesis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14023

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