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Secure Data Transfer

Transfering research data from remote sensors to the research center

Helmi-components

Components of Helmi. (image: HCDC)

The collection and usage of sensor data are crucial in science, enabling the evaluation of experiments and validation of numerical simulations. With the rise of IoT and diverse data collection mechanisms, a secure data transfer from sensor systems, that are oftentimes located outside of the campus of a research center and thus are not connected to the same network as the rest of the IT infrastructure, is paramount. At HCDC , our solution to enabling this is HELMI (HEreon Layer for Managing Incoming data).

Key Components & Software of HELMI

  • WireGuard (Security) Secure and stable VPN Tunnelling for data transfer. Transfer made secure via public and pre-shared key encryption. phyGATE image comes with a WireGuard client. (Security)
  • VerneMQ Cluster (Availability of data) Two node VerneMQ cluster has been established at Hereon for MQTT real time data transfer. Postgres is used as the authentication database.
  • rsync File Transfer (Reliability of data transfer) File based transfer of the data based on rsync protocol which pulls in the data within Hereon Network whenever there is new data available on client end.
  • phyGATE Hardware Plug n Play device with Embedded Linux system (YOCTO) with an 8Gb RAM

Example-of-helmi-installed-in-a-vessel

Helmi connected to Ludwig Prandtl measuring box (Image: Christian Jacobsen/Hereon)

Data Transfer Workflows

At Hereon, we have three workflows for enabling secure sensor data transfer.

1. HELMI (Hardware connected to the network)

The hardware from the company Phytec is setup with an embedded linux kernel and required software for making data transfer possible and is installed into the local network of the platform/vessel

Data-flow-from-helmi-to-hereon

Data flow from HELMI to Hereon. (image: HCDC)

2. Helmi Lite

The second is HELMI lite where we set up the software for HELMI and scripts for transferring the data from the source machine on a platform into our infrastructure.

3. Accessing data via API’s of Sensors (e.g. Drifter data)

Routines are set up where API from sensors can be requested to access data and then stoed into our infrastructure.

Data-flow-from-sensor-api-to-hereon

Data flow from Sensor API to Hereon. (image: HCDC)