Trusted Research Environment and Enclave for Hosting Open Original Science Exploration (TREEHOOSE)

Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are used by many organisations to securely manage sensitive data for research. Despite the commonality of need there is currently little standardisation of infrastructure or deployment between operators, leading to duplication of effort and impeding service improvement. TREEHOOSE aims to build on our experience of migrating a TRE hosting NHS data to public cloud for the benefit of other operators.

We will also to include a new capability of Enclave computing to achieve mutually trust-free computation, protecting users’ IP and code as well as the data.

We will release open-source tooling to streamline building and operating TREs on public cloud infrastructure whilst maintaining security and trust. Secure Enclaves go beyond the traditional TRE infrastructure by adding additional barriers to prevent software algorithms from leaking data. A kit will be developed into which researchers can add their AI or other analytical code for execution within a cloud TRE, safe in the knowledge that their code is protected from reverse-engineering or unauthorised sharing even by the TRE operators, with cryptographically-verified repeatable dependencies.

TREEHOOSE will enable wider adoption of TREs and increased security modes of working thereby making possible research data analysis at scale while maintaining maximum data protections.