OSSDIP: Open Source Secure Data Infrastructure and Processes Platform that Supports Data Visiting

Problem Statement

Meeting the conflicting goals of protecting and maintaining control over sensitive data while also allowing access by third parties constitutes a significant challenge. Secure data infrastructures support data visiting in a highly controlled and monitored environment which, if properly set-up and operated, provide high security guarantees through a combination of technical, legal and procedural mechanisms.

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Application Areas

To ease the process of deploying such a secure data infrastructure, we present a detailed documentation of the architecture and processes of such an infrastructure and provide a pre-configured reference implementation based entirely on open source software that can be flexibly configured to meet differing security requirements and deployment scenarios.

We combine mechanisms for data visiting on secured infrastructure components with optional components of data anonymization and fingerprinting, covered by extensive logging and monitoring functions and embedded in defined processes and contractual frameworks.

The set-up is based upon the experience of operating such a secure infrastructure in the medical domain for almost ten years, addressing the emerging need to make such a solution available to a larger set of stakeholders. We show that our system significantly enhances data visiting, offers a higher level of data isolation and present our open source reference implementation thereof.

Acknowledgements

This project is supported by EOSC Secretariat in cooperation with COVID-19 Future Operations and EOSC-Life. We thank Martin Weise for the automatization of the project which greatly improves the flexibility, overall infrastructure testing, set-up of the repository and documentation of the project.

Special thanks goes to:

1. The team of the Coordination and Communications team (ZKK) at the Faculty of Informatics of TU Wien,
2. The team operating the DEXHELPP infrastructure, as well as
3. Numerous experts contributing to the discussion and design of this infrastructure, at TU Wien, SBA-Research and several other institutions, as well as
4. The EOSC-Secretariat project for its support under the Co-Creation programme (call H2020-INFRAEOSC-05-2018-2019, grant agreement number 831644), as well as
5. The EOSC-Life project for its supported under the Digital Life Sciences Open Call (call EH2020-INFRAEOSC-05-2018-201, grant agreement number 824087), and
6. The Austrian COVID19 Future Operations board