Security and Trust
The European Compute and Data Continuum will be a federated infrastructure spanning multiple countries, institutions, and administrative domains. In such an environment, trust and security are not add-ons but foundational enablers (e.g. AARC Blueprint Architecture). They ensure that (sensitive) data, compute resources, and workflows are protected while still enabling frictionless collaboration across organizational and national boundaries. Both HEP and RA rely heavily on global collaboration, but they have to comply with EU regulations on privacy, data protection, and cybersecurity.
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Access to resources is governed by a federated IAM system. HEP and RA communities rely on global identity federations (such as eduGAIN) so that researchers can use their home institution credentials across all sites. Once authenticated, user attributes (collaboration membership, VO roles, project grants) travel with the identity so that access policies can make decisions. For example, an authenticated physicist’s request for a dataset triggers a check in the federated IAM: if he/she is a member of the owning experiment, access is granted. According to the survey carried out by the SPECTRUM CoP there is a lot of fragmentation in the currently used tools, almost equally shared between Indigo-IAM, CERN-SSO and EGI Check-in (with MyAccessID being used by the EFP). A unified solution would be preferable for any future compute and data continuum.
Policy Enforcement
Trust in a federated environment depends on shared rules, policies, and validation processes. The trust framework must define the criteria for participation (technical, organizational, and policy compliance) and provide mechanisms for continuous validation of participants. For example, sites must demonstrate that their infrastructure complies with minimum security baselines, privacy regulations, and FAIR principles. Digital certificates and accredited attribute providers reduce reliance on manual validation, making trust decisions scalable (however many modern legal interpretations require that all actions must be traceable to a unique and natural person and this needs to be solved for bulk workloads). In practice, this mirrors existing trust models in the WLCG but extends them to include HPC and cloud facilities with different compliance regimes. Once policies are defined, they must be enforceable in real time. Policies define rules such as “data from telescope X can only be stored in GDPR-compliant facilities within the EU” or “users must re-authenticate with multi-factor authentication when accessing Tier-0 resources.”
Privacy and Data Protection
While most HEP and RA data are not personal, the continuum will inevitably process some sensitive datasets (e.g., medical imaging in cross-domain digital twin applications, AI models trained on personal mobility data for environmental research). Compliance with GDPR and future EU data protection legislation is mandatory. Technical safeguards include encryption at rest and in transit, differential privacy techniques for sensitive AI/ML use cases, federated training of AI models, and logged trails for data access. The framework must also respect data sovereignty, ensuring that data remains within designated jurisdictions when required.