Building an encrypted file system on the EGEE grid: application to protein sequence analysis

Abstract

Bioinformatics needs high-throughput computing and huge data storage to understand datasets such as ones produced by complete genome projects. But these data are linked to patients, and used in scientific or industrial processes such as drug design and gene function identification. These use cases need to have a certain level of confidentiality and integrity to preserve the patient privacy or the patent secret. Obviously important in a local computing context such as supercomputer or cluster, these requirements are exarcebated in the context of a grid such EGEE, where the computing and storage resources are distributed across a worldwide platform. We have developed the EncFile encrypted files management system, deployed on the production platform of the EGEE project, and associated to encrypted representative biological resources. Thus we provided grid users with a user-friendly component that doesn't require any user privileges. Moreover, our EncFile system can be also deployed on other distributed systems as it is not linked to the EGEE grid components.