Hackers Listen In on What Synthetic DNA Machines Are Printing

Biologists synthesizing DNA in a lab are no different, only the custom-designed genetic materials their machines piece together arguably have more street value.

Which is why operators usually keep DNA synthesizers offline, to prevent a cyber-heist of those precious strings of As and Ts and Cs and Gs that spell out instructions for lucrative new biological functions. But one group of biohackers has demonstrated for the first time that its possible to steal and reverse-engineer the genetic code stitched together by DNA synthesizers by simply recording the sounds they make.

In new work they presented at last weeks Network & Distributed System Security Symposium, a team of researchers from UC Irvine and UC Riverside unveiled a so-called acoustic side-channel attack on a popular DNA-making machine, a vulnerability they say could imperil the up-and-coming synthetic biology and DNA-based data storage industries. It could also have important potential counterterrorism applicationsfor monitoring suspect machines to see if theyre manufacturing deadly pathogens or other biological weapons.

Using an audio recorder, the researchers collected the noise involved in the processvalves opening, liquids being injected, plastic pipes vibratingand then used machine learning models to pick out unique acoustic features for each A, G, T, and C as those nucleotides are added to the sequence.

By combining them with off-the-shelf DNA sequencing software, the researchers boosted the accuracy to almost 100 percent, especially for longer sequences.For anyone pursuing DNA-based computer storage or engineering designer microbes to burp out the next wonder drug, the message is clear: before you write anything in genetic code, check and see who else might be listening.

Original article