Project: FIN-CLARIAH
Grant agreement: Research Council of Finland no. 358720
Start date: 01-01-2024
Duration: 24 months
WP 3.1: Report on Integrate environment for personal data
Date of reporting: 30-09-2024
Report authors: Mietta Lennes (UH)
Contributors: Martin Matthiesen (CSC)
Deliverable location: https://www.kielipankki.fi/support/sd-services/
Keywords for the deliverable page: sensitive data; confidential data; secure desktop; SD services
In case a research dataset contains special categories of personal data or other types of confidential information that cannot be removed without hampering the research purpose, it may be necessary to use a secure environment for processing the data (cf. Deliverable 2.1.2 of the previous funding period of FIN-CLARIAH 2022-2023).
CSC – IT Center for Science provides Sensitive Data services for sharing and analyzing data securely from a web browser. The sensitive data files can be encrypted and uploaded via SD Connect, where they are available to the secure desktop instances of the members of the same project. The virtual machines for the secure desktops are configured and accessed via SD Desktop.
It is also possible to install and use special tools in the SD Desktop environment. Researchers who need to process audio and video material securely can now also conveniently install tools such as ELAN (video and audio) or Praat (audio) for viewing, editing, annotating, querying and analyzing their data, or well-known command-line tools such as Whisper (automatic speech recognition) as part of their workflow in the secure environment. For faster access to audio and video files, and external volume can be selected when configuring the virtual machine.
We will continue testing, documenting and improving the functionalities of the SD Desktop with the users of the Language Bank. We are also looking into the possibility of the Language Bank using SD Desktop instances for providing individual users with restricted access to specific sensitive datasets. The SD services are still under active development and the remaining issues can be addressed in collaboration with the experts at CSC.
For researchers in the SSH fields, the step-by-step instructions for using the Sensitive Data services are now maintained on a support page in the online portal of the Language Bank of Finland.
