GA4GH Passport standard for digital identity and access permissions

Craig Voisin; Mikael Linden; Stephanie O M Dyke; Sarion R Bowers; Pinar Alper; Maxmillian P Barkley; David Bernick; Jianpeng Chao; Mélanie Courtot; Francis Jeanson; Melissa A Konopko; Martin Kuba; Jonathan Lawson; Jaakko Leinonen; Stephanie Li; Vivian Ota Wang; Anthony A Philippakis; Kathy Reinold; Gregory A Rushton; J Dylan Spalding; Juha Törnroos; Ilya Tulchinsky; Jaime M Guidry Auvil; Tommi H Nyrönen

doi:10.1016/j.xgen.2021.100030

GA4GH Passport standard for digital identity and access permissions

Cell Genom. 2021 Nov 10;1(2):None. doi: 10.1016/j.xgen.2021.100030.

Authors

Craig Voisin¹, Mikael Linden^{2

3}, Stephanie O M Dyke⁴, Sarion R Bowers⁵, Pinar Alper⁶, Maxmillian P Barkley⁷, David Bernick⁸, Jianpeng Chao¹, Mélanie Courtot⁹, Francis Jeanson¹⁰, Melissa A Konopko^{5

11}, Martin Kuba¹², Jonathan Lawson⁸, Jaakko Leinonen², Stephanie Li^{8

11}, Vivian Ota Wang¹³, Anthony A Philippakis⁸, Kathy Reinold⁸, Gregory A Rushton⁸, J Dylan Spalding^{2

3}, Juha Törnroos^{2

3}, Ilya Tulchinsky¹⁴, Jaime M Guidry Auvil¹³, Tommi H Nyrönen^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Google LLC, Kitchener, ON N2H 5G5, Canada.
² CSC-IT Center for Science, Espoo 02101, Finland.
³ ELIXIR Finland, Espoo 02101, Finland.
⁴ McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2B4, Canada.
⁵ Wellcome Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire CB10 1SA, UK.
⁶ ELIXIR Luxembourg, Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, University of Luxembourg, 4367 Belvaux, Luxembourg.
⁷ DNAstack, Toronto, ON M5H 1T1, Canada.
⁸ Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
⁹ European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Hinxton, Cambridgeshire CB10 1SD, UK.
¹⁰ Datadex Inc., Toronto, ON M5V 0C4, Canada.
¹¹ Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, Toronto, ON M5G 0A3, Canada.
¹² Masaryk University, Brno 602 00, Czech Republic.
¹³ National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
¹⁴ Verily Life Sciences, South San Francisco, CA 94080, USA.

Abstract

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) supports international standards that enable a federated data sharing model for the research community while respecting data security, ethical and regulatory frameworks, and data authorization and access processes for sensitive data. The GA4GH Passport standard (Passport) defines a machine-readable digital identity that conveys roles and data access permissions (called "visas") for individual users. Visas are issued by data stewards, including data access committees (DACs) working with public databases, the entities responsible for the quality, integrity, and access arrangements for the datasets in the management of human biomedical data. Passports streamline management of data access rights across data systems by using visas that present a data user's digital identity and permissions across organizations, tools, environments, and services. We describe real-world implementations of the GA4GH Passport standard in use cases from ELIXIR Europe, National Institutes of Health, and the Autism Sharing Initiative. These implementations demonstrate that the Passport standard has provided transparent mechanisms for establishing permissions and authorizing data access across platforms.

Keywords: access; authorization; data; federation; genomics; identity; infrastructure; regulation; security; standard.

Abstract

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