A Distributed Architecture for Sharing Ecological Data Sets with Access and Usage Control Guarantees

Session A2: Sharing Scientific Environmental Data and Models

In our information-age, the necessary scientific exploration is mainly driven by mining new insights from many diverse data sets. While there is a consensus that a collaborative data infrastructure is needed to allow researchers in different domains to collaborate on the same data sets in order to get new insights, there are significant barriers to the realization of this vision. One of the key challenges is to allow scientists to share their data widely while retaining some form of control over who accesses this data (access control) and more importantly how it is used (usage control). Access and usage control is necessary to enforce existing open data policies. We have proposed the vision of trusted cells: A decentralized infrastructure, based on secure hardware running on devices equipped with trusted execution environments at the edges of the Internet. We originally described the utilization of trusted cells for the management of personal data. We describe our vision and report on our progress towards the implementation of trusted cells on off-the-shelf hardware components. We show how trusted cells deployed in the field and throughout the community could make it possible to share ecological data sets with access and usage control guarantees. We rely on examples from terrestrial research and monitoring in the arctic in the context of the INTERACT project.