Privacy issues in integrating R environment in scientific workflows

1
Privacy issues in integrating R environment in
scientific workflows

• Dr. Zhiming Zhao
• University of Amsterdam
• Virtual Laboratory for e-Science

Privacy issues in integrating Legacy Experiment
Environment to Scientific WorkflowsZhiming Zhao,
Dmitry A. Vasunin, Adianto Wibisono, Adam
Belloum, Cees de Laat, Pieter Adriaans, Bob
Hertzberger
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Outline

• Scientific experiments and R
• Problem description
• Optional solutions
• Experimental results
• Summarizing discussion
• Future work

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Scientific experiments and support systems

• In such scenarios
• Existing experiment environments, such as R, are
  widely used by domain scientists
• Human in the loop computing is important for
  testing and validating prototypes
• scientific workflows are used to manage different
  processes and the experiment lifecycle

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R and workflow support in VL-e

• R realises rich functionality of data statistics
  and visualisation, and has been used as an
  important experimental environment in
  bio-sciences.
• R needs scientific workflow support
• Accessing different e-Science resources
• Being coordinated with the other components in a
  large scale experiment
• E-Science workflows in certain domains also need
  R
• Reuse the advanced results from legacy systems
• Support experiments developed on legacy systems
• Workflow support in VL-e
• Four systems are recommended
• Taverna, Kepler and VLAM have support to R
• A generic solution is under construction

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R in scientific workflows current solutions

• Three types of solutions
• Local local installation of R, through the
  command line interface of R
• Simple configuration
• Performance bottleneck
• Web Service SOAP to pass R script and objects
• Standard interface, distributed computing
• High latency
• TCP Socket socket interface (RServe)
• Distributed computing
• Maintain states
• Poor security

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Typical scenario of RServe and requirements on
privacy

• Different levels of privacy issues
• Data level
• Intermediate results not to be seen by the other
  users
• Communication level graphical display
• Remote X display and interaction between multi
  users

WF1
WF2
R
Display
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Problem description and desired solution

• Problem description
• Most of the legacy experiment environment do not
  have strong security management
• Workflow systems provide integration without
  considering security issues
• The deployment of remote environment is required
  to be secure
• Desire
• Using existing technologies
• Provide solutions to privacy issues at workflow
  level, preferably in a transparent way

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Experiments

• Review optional solutions
• Investigate the overhead of security enhancement
  on the workflow execution

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Different configurations and their level of
security
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An experiment Taverna, RServe and security tunnel

• Experiment
• Adding security enhancement in Taverna
• Protect the data channels between Taverna and
  RServe
• Overhead
• Setting up security tunnels
• Runtime data transfer

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Summarizing discussion

• Integrating existing experiment environment with
  workflow system is important for rapid
  prototyping
• Privacy issues are demanded by both users and
  e-Science infrastructure, and can be viewed a
  generic issue when integrating a user interaction
  enabled legacy component in workflow
• Privacy protection can be achieved at certain
  level by customizing the workflow execution
• Enhancing workflow execution not necessarily
  gives high penalty on execution

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Future work

• In the VL-e project, we are developing a bus
  style generic solution for different workflow
  systems
• Taking the data privacy into account when
  realizing the interoperability between different
  workflow systems

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Activities

• Intl workshop on Workflow systems in
  e-Science, organized by Zhiming Zhao and Adam
  Belloum, in the context of ICCS, 2006 Reading
  University, 2007 Beijing, China.
• Proceedings is in LNCS, Springer Verlag.
• A special issue will be published in Scientific
  Programming Journal.
• http//staff.science.uva.nl/zhiming/iccs-wses
• Workshop on Scientific workflows and industrial
  workflow standards in e-Science , organized by
  Adam Belloum and Zhiming Zhao, in the context of
  IEEE e-Science and Grid computing conference in
  Amsterdam December 2006.
• Pegasus, Dr. Ewa Deelman (Department of Computer
  Science University of South California)
• BPEL, Dr. Dieter König (IBM Research Germany
  Development Laboratory)
• Kepler, Dr. Bertram Ludäscher (Department of
  Computer Science University of California, Davis)
  
• Taverna, Prof. Peter Rice (European
  Bioinformatics Institute)
• WS and Semantic issues, Dr. Steve Ross-Talbot
  (CEO, and a co-founder, of Pi4 Technologies)
• Triana, Dr. Ian J. Taylor (Department of Computer
  Science Cardiff University)
• http//staff.science.uva.nl/adam/workshop/VL-e-wo
  rkshop.htm