Security and GDPR Compliance for In Silico Medicine and Omics Sciences Data
Introduction
The project “Security and GDPR Compliance for In Silico Medicine and Omics Sciences Data” addresses the crucial challenge of combining the need to manage petabytes of complex biological data (genomics, proteomics, computational simulations) with the stringent regulatory requirements imposed by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The highly sensitive nature of health data necessitates adopting an architecture that guarantees confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data at every stage. To this end, the project has focused its infrastructure development and analysis on the following technological pillars:
- Rucio (Data Management System)
- Keycloak (Authentication & Authorization)
- FTS (File Transfer Service)
The synergistic integration of Rucio, Keycloak and FTS provides the technical foundation for a robust and simultaneously compliant research ecosystem, where data management, secure access, and efficient movement are key elements for advanced biomedical research.
Intelligent Data Management with Rucio, Keycloak and FTS
Large-scale management of scientific and corporate data is one of the most complex challenges in the world of research and technological innovation today. The continuous growth in the volume of information – often distributed across data centers, clouds, and heterogeneous systems – requires advanced tools to ensure security, efficiency, and reliability.
What is Data Management?
Data Management is a set of practices, technologies, and processes that allow data to be stored, organized, protected and made accessible throughout its entire lifecycle.
An effective approach doesn’t just “store” the data; it makes it available where and when it’s needed, while simultaneously ensuring its security and regulatory compliance.
Rucio: The Brain of Distributed Data Management
Rucio is an open-source platform, originally developed at CERN for the ATLAS experiment, now adopted by various international-scale scientific projects.
Its main characteristics are:
- Intelligent Replica Management: guarantees that data always has the correct number of copies in different locations, reducing the risk of loss.
- Multi-Storage Support: works with disks, magnetic tapes, and the cloud, without being tied to a single technology.
- Automated Policies: users define rules (“maintain 3 copies of this dataset on different continents”), and Rucio applies them autonomously.
- Scalability: designed to manage exabyte levels of data quantities.
Keycloak: The Secure Access Gateway
If Rucio is the brain of data management, Keycloak is the access guardian. It is an open-source solution for Identity and Access Management (IAM) that ensures only authorized users and services can interact with resources.
With Keycloak, you get:
- Centralized and Secure Authentication (unified login with Single Sign-On).
- Support for Popular Standards (OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, SAML 2.0).
- Comprehensive User Management (registration, password reset, multi-factor authentication).
- Role and Attribute-Based Authorizations, to precisely control what each user can do.
FTS: The Data Transfer Engine
The File Transfer Service (FTS), also developed at CERN, is a highly reliable and optimized system for transferring massive volumes of data between globally distributed sites.
Its core functions are:
- Automated and Resilient Transfers: manages queues of files to be moved between different storage systems, with automatic retries in case of errors.
- Network Resource Optimization: plans transfer by considering available bandwidth and reducing congestion.
- Security: supports secure protocols and authentication mechanisms based on certificates or tokens.
- Monitoring and Tracking: every transfer is tracked, with detailed reports on status, speed and success.
Rucio + Keycloak + FTS:
a Complete Solution
The combination of these three technologies allows for building a distributed, secure, and efficient Data Management infrastructure:
- Rucio coordinates and governs the data, deciding what needs to be replicated and where.
- FTS is the engine that physically executes large-scale file transfers, guaranteeing speed and reliability.
- Keycloak secures access by managing identities, roles, and permissions, ensuring that only authorized users and services can interact with the data.
Together, these tools form an ecosystem that enables users to:
- Securely manage petabytes and exabytes of data.
- Ensure operational continuity even in the event of network errors or storage issues.
- Maintain full control over access, permissions, and resource utilization.
Open Science/FAIR Compliant Online Repository
As part of project SECUREMED, some of the main scientific results of the project and relevant data have been published openly and transparently in accordance with the principles of “Open Science” and “FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Data.”
To this end, the Zenodo repository (https://zenodo.org/) was used, which complies with the aforementioned principles.
Below are the SECUREMED project documents published on Zenodo, complete with DOI identifiers:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17530591
