Design and implementation of security in a data collection system for epidemiology

Health informatics can benefit greatly from the e-Science approach, which is characterised by large scale distributed resource sharing and collaboration. Ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of data has always been the first requirement of health informatics systems. The PsyGrid data collection system, addresses both, providing secure distributed data collection for epidemiology. We have used Grid-computing approaches and technologies to address this problem. We describe the architecture and implementation of the security sub-system in detail.