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Increased cyber-biosecurity for DNA synthesis

Nature Biotechnology volume 38, pages 1379–1381 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Commercial DNA synthesizers sell billions of nucleotides to customers each year, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in sales1. As DNA synthesis becomes more widespread, concern is mounting that a cyberattack intervening with synthetic DNA orders could lead to the synthesis of nucleic acids encoding parts of pathogenic organisms or harmful proteins and toxins. Reassuringly, such an attack is non-trivial. Most DNA synthesis providers check each requested sequence across databases of problematic sequences before order fulfillment, as per the 2010 US Health and Human Services guidelines2. Unfortunately, however, there are no comprehensive databases of pathogenic sequences, and the guidelines — unenforced outside of US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grantees3 — are outdated.

Two industry groups have developed additional guidelines to fill the vacuum4. The International Association Synthetic Biology’s (IASB) 2009 code requires record keeping of suspicious requests and screening of customers and sequences5. And the International Gene Synthesis Consortium (IGSC) best practices, revised6 in 2017, require synthesizers to both scan every sub-sequence of 200 consecutive base pairs (bp) and apply a best-match approach. Suspicious sequences require human inspection to verify safety and legitimacy. Human follow-ups are, however, costly and time consuming. And, without a comprehensive penetration testing of the screening frameworks, some pathogenic sequences will fall through the oversight cracks.

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Fig. 1: Malicious DNA injection performed by a remote cyber-criminal.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software and Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Rami Puzis & Yuval Elovici

  2. Cyber Security Research Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Rami Puzis, Dor Farbiash, Oleg Brodt & Yuval Elovici

  3. Jusidman Science Center for Youth, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Dor Farbiash

  4. Telekom Innovation Labs, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Oleg Brodt

  5. Zvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies, IDC Herzliya, Herzliya, Israel

    Dov Greenbaum

  6. Harry Radzyner School of Law, IDC Herzliya, Herzliya, Israel

    Dov Greenbaum

  7. Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Dov Greenbaum

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  1. Rami Puzis
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  2. Dor Farbiash
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Correspondence to Dov Greenbaum.

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Puzis, R., Farbiash, D., Brodt, O. et al. Increased cyber-biosecurity for DNA synthesis. Nat Biotechnol 38, 1379–1381 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-00761-y

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