Presenter: Yohai Meiron & Shawn Winnington-Ball, SciNet

We introduce a secure computing enclave at SciNet High-Performance Computing Consortium. Codenamed S4H, this environment is already available to groups at the University of Toronto as a pilot project. S4H aims to meet researchers’ needs for hosting and working with sensitive data, which SciNet’s main cluster, Niagara, does not accommodate. In the first part (Yohai), we’ll delve into the technical details. We’ll explain how S4H is different from Niagara in that the data are encrypted at rest and access is hardened, and what that means in practice. We will talk about the difficulties of providing isolation for different research groups on a shared system, and explore the different components that make it possible, such as key management and containerization mechanisms. The second part (Shawn) will focus on adopting the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) framework. We’ll describe our journey deciphering the control set’s complexities, developing metadata for organizing remediation efforts, and crafting Plans of Action and Milestones for compliance gaps. Future steps include internal and potentially external assessments to verify compliance, with initiatives like Privacy Impact Assessment and penetration testing, with the eventual goal of being certified for Level 4 data.