Acoustic Side Channel Attack Against DNA Synthesis Machines: Poster Abstract

Synthetic DNA molecules play an essential role in genomics research and are a promising, high-capacity data storage medium. Currently, researchers use automated DNA synthesizers to custom-build sequences of oligonucleotides (short DNA strands) using the nucleobases: Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C), and Thymine (T). Research laboratories invest large amounts of capital to engineer unique oligonucleotide sequences. In our work, we demonstrate the vulnerability of commonly used DNA synthesizers to acoustic side-channel attacks, where confidentiality can be breached to steal precious DNA sequences. We introduce a novel methodology to reverse engineer the acoustic noise generated by the DNA synthesizer and extract the type and order of the nucleobases delivered to the output. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which highlights the possibility of physical-to-cyber attacks in DNA synthesis technologies.