PASTA-4-PHT: A Pipeline for Automated Security and Technical Audits for the Personal Health Train

Abstract: With the introduction of data protection regulations, the need for innovative privacy-preserving approaches to process and analyse sensitive data has become apparent. One approach is the Personal Health Train (PHT) that brings analysis code to the data and conducts the data processing at the data premises. However, despite its demonstrated success in various studies, the execution of external code in sensitive environments, such as hospitals, introduces new research challenges because the interactions of the code with sensitive data are often incomprehensible and lack transparency. These interactions raise concerns about potential effects on the data and increases the risk of data breaches. To address this issue, this work discusses a PHT-aligned security and audit pipeline inspired by DevSecOps principles. The automated pipeline incorporates multiple phases that detect vulnerabilities. To thoroughly study its versatility, we evaluate this pipeline in two ways. First, we deliberately introduce vulnerabilities into a PHT. Second, we apply our pipeline to five real-world PHTs, which have been utilised in real-world studies, to audit them for potential vulnerabilities. Our evaluation demonstrates that our designed pipeline successfully identifies potential vulnerabilities and can be applied to real-world studies. In compliance with the requirements of the GDPR for data management, documentation, and protection, our automated approach supports researchers using in their data-intensive work and reduces manual overhead. It can be used as a decision-making tool to assess and document potential vulnerabilities in code for data processing. Ultimately, our work contributes to an increased security and overall transparency of data processing activities within the PHT framework.