What do local police organizations and hospitals have in common? Both typically see only fragments of a bigger picture, and both face tight restrictions on sharing data with external organisations. That bigger picture might be a virus outbreak, or a nationwide series of related incidents.
At present, data exchange between organisations, even between two local police units or two hospitals, tends to be slow, ad hoc and reliant on manual processes. This holds true even when the goal is simply to identify similarities between cases or draw conclusions from a wider pattern of events.
While a highly restrictive and regulated approach to data protects it from unauthorised access and safeguards our fundamental right to privacy, crime investigation and medical research need quality data fast, while still retaining confidentiality and allowing only authorised access. Every missed opportunity to quickly identify a perpetrator or link incidents across different institutions has serious implications, from direct damages to wider societal costs. On the reporting and research side, the lack of a secure standard slows down data exchange and wastes scarce resources.
The SUNFISH approach
To resolve this conflict between confidentiality and usability, the SUNFISH Horizon 2020 project, focused on advanced cloud infrastructures and services, developed a secure cloud-based solution designed to work across organisational borders.
The technical building blocks were chosen in line with e-government trends seen in countries such as Estonia, Finland, Ukraine, Namibia and Haiti, all of which have deployed similar platforms for secure federated data exchange at national level. Cybernetica sees secure multiparty computation (MPC) as the next logical step in the evolution of safe data analysis.
The solution integrates two Cybernetica's core platforms:
- Unified Exchange Platform UXP for secure federated data exchange on country or international level
- Sharemind secure computation platform for developing the application for secure search and sharing of information.
Together with the partners from the UK, South East Regional Organised Crime Unit, SEROCU and the University of Southampton, SOTON, Cybernetica developed the solution for encrypted sharing and finding relevant cases, while confidential data stays encrypted, and releasing the material to selected authorized individuals.
Deployment and outlook
The SUNFISH secure search solution is deployed in a hybrid cloud environment and controlled by independent partners: Italy's Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) in their computing centre, the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA) on the Azure public cloud, and Cybernetica, also on the Azure public cloud. This solution has real potential to make case data available faster and more reliably, improving the quality and effectiveness of investigations while showing that scalable cloud solutions can be used securely.
Cybernetica has identified similar needs in numerous countries, both inside and outside the EU. There is a clear appetite for cooperation at organisational, local government and state level, and even two organisations working together can act as innovators in this space. The broader and faster access to quality data becomes, the greater the benefits, provided confidentiality remains protected throughout.
To make cloud deployment of these core technologies easier, the UXP Security Server is now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. The Sharemind SDK and Emulator are available to developers under an open-source GPL3 licence, the Academic Server can be licensed free of charge to privacy research organisations, and commercial licensing is available for service providers and resellers.
ch organizations and commercial licencing is available for service providers and resellers.
The SUNFISH project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644666.