Talk submission for RSLondonSouthEast2020

[martintoreilly]

RSLondonSouthEast2020

Poster

Poster shared on Figshare under CC-BY licence. DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11815224 Short DOI: https://doi.org/dk6k

Event details

Workshop date: Thu 06 Feb 2020 Workshop location: Royal Society, London Workshop link: https://rslondon.ac.uk/rslondonse-2020/ Submission deadline: 11 Dec 2019 Submission type: 20 min talk (including questions) Submission link: https://rslondon.ac.uk/rslondonse-2020/call-for-submissions/ Notification of acceptance date: Tue 23 Dec 2019

Submission

I submitted the following on 11 Dec 2019. The author list is everyone on the current ArXiv version of our policy paper, plus Ben Walden (collating community feedback and redrafting policy paper), Dan Allen and Warwick Wood (both making significant contributions to our Azure reference implementation).

Presenter

Martin O'Reilly (The Alan Turing Institute)

Co-authors

Daniel Allen (The Alan Turing Institute) Diego Arenas (University of St Andrews) Jon Atkins (The Alan Turing Institute) Claire Austin (The British Library) David Beavan (The Alan Turing Institute) Alvaro Cabrejas Egea (The Alan Turing Institute, University of Warwick) Steven Carlysle-Davies (University of Edinburgh) Ian Carter (The Alan Turing Institute) Rob Clarke (Corinium Technology Limited) James Cunningham (University of Manchester) Tom Doel (Code Choreography) Oliver Forrest (The Alan Turing Institute) Evelina Gabasova (The Alan Turing Institute) James Geddes (The Alan Turing Institute) James Hetherington (The Alan Turing Institute) Radka Jersakova (The Alan Turing Institute) Franz Kiraly (The Alan Turing Institute) Catherine Lawrence (The Alan Turing Institute) Jules Manser (The Alan Turing Institute) James Robinson (The Alan Turing Institute) Helen Sherwood-Taylor (RRD Labs Ltd) Serena Tierney (VVW LLP) Catalina A. Vallejos (The Alan Turing Institute, University of Edinburgh) Sebastian Vollmer (The Alan Turing Institute, University of Warwick) Benjamin Walden (The Alan Turing Institute) Kirstie Whitaker (The Alan Turing Institute, University of Cambridge) Warwick Wood (The Alan Turing Institute)

Abstract title

Data Safe Havens in the Cloud

Keywords

Cloud computing, Data Safe Haven, Software-defined infrastructure, Secure computing, Sensitive data

Type of submission

Full presentation (20 minutes, including questions)

Abstract

The data science research community frequently encounters a need for:

• Secure environments for analysis of sensitive datasets
• A productive environment for curiosity-driven research
• High performance computing capability

These requirements have, to our knowledge, not yet been realised simultaneously.

Some solutions render research unproductive by making it hard to author new code while engaging with the data, or to experiment with the many software libraries realising new analytical techniques. Others lack access to large scale or specialised compute power such as clusters or GPUs.

This perversely reduces security: researchers route around carefully constructed secure environments to avoid perceived productivity loss, increasing the risk of a breach.

An organisation then lacks a clear inventory of all the datasets it is handling, and the risk profile in terms of consequences and threat actors for each.

The Alan Turing Institute has been developing recommended policies and controls for performing productive research on sensitive data, as well as a cloud-based reference implementation. This comprises:

• Clearly defined sensitivity tiers for handling data, mapping to existing data classification and risk categorisation systems, but adapting and extending these to research activities
• A web-based system for review and classification of datasets, and the allocation of users and datasets to projects
• Automated creation of multiple, independent secure environments, each configured according to the appropriate classification tier for the project

A cloud-based approach to secure infrastructure means deployment and configuration of environments is efficient, reliable and auditable, as well as providing access to scalable high performance computing.

[martintoreilly]

@bw-faststream @warwick26 @sysdan Are you all ok being listed as authors on this presentation?

[bw-faststream]

Happy to be, would you like any help with the presentation and/or preparing it?

[sysdan]

I'm ok with this.

[warwick26]

I'm ok with this.

[martintoreilly]

Thanks all. There are also opportunities to talk about this work at:

• The UKRI Cloud Workshop on Tue 03 March at the Crick, just next door. 20 min talk submissions. No specific theme on computing on sensitive data, but perhaps could fit in "Organisational challenges" or "HPC in the cloud" themes? They also say submissions outside these themes are welcome, so I'm sure we'd stand a decent chance of acceptance.
• The Software Sustainability Institute Collaborations Workshop on 31 Mar - 01 April in Belfast (with an optional Hack Day on 02 April). Call is for mini-workshops and demo sessions 40 to 55 minutes long (with the option to span over multiple sessions). Themes are Open Research, Data Privacy and Software Sustainability so an easy fit to the second I think. It would be super cool if we could have people deploy their own safe haven on the day! I'm also planning to submit a proposal for QUIPP (our synthetic data project), so I might not be able to be the submitter for both of these (not should I necessarily be).

Submissions deadlines for both are 31 Jan, so we can pick this up in the New Year and work out who should present at what.

[martintoreilly]

Reverting this to a single topic issue for the RSLondonSouthEast2020 talk submission. Opened issues #521 and #522 for UKRI Cloud and SSI CW20 workshops submissions respectively.

[martintoreilly]

We didn't get accepted for a full talk, but were asked if we wanted to present a poster, and I've said we will.

[martintoreilly]

@bw-faststream Please could you put together a poster for this?

[bw-faststream]

Hi Martin, absolutely - I'll get this done over the next few days.

[martintoreilly]

Poster shared on Figshare under CC-BY licence. DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11815224 Short DOI: https://doi.org/dk6k