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Announcements

NCCoE Releases Cybersecurity of Genomic Data Draft NIST IR for Public Comment

NIST | NCCoE

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has published Draft NIST Internal Report (NIST IR) 8432, Cybersecurity of Genomic Data. The public comment period is now open through April 3, 2023.

About This Report

Genomic data has enabled the rapid growth of the U.S. bioeconomy and is valuable to the individual, industry, and government due to intrinsic properties that, in combination, make it different from other types of high-value data which possess only a subset of these properties. The characteristics of genomic data compared to other high value datasets raises some correspondingly unique cybersecurity and privacy challenges that are inadequately addressed with current policies, guidance, and technical controls.

This report describes current practices in risk management, cybersecurity, and privacy management for protecting genomic data, as well as the associated challenges and concerns. It identifies gaps in protection practices across the genomic data lifecycle and proposes solutions to address real-life use cases occurring at various stages of the genomic data lifecycle. This report also is intended to provide areas for regulatory/policy enactment or further research.

Submit Your Comments

The public comment period closes at 11:59 PM ET on April 3, 2023. Please email all draft comments to genomic_cybersecurity_nccoe@nist.gov. We encourage you to use the comment template available from the NIST CSRC publication details page.

Stay Connected

If you would like to help shape this project, consider joining the NCCoE Genomics Cybersecurity Community of Interest (COI), which you can do directly from our project page or by contacting the project team at genomic_cybersecurity_nccoe@nist.gov.