Five Safes TES

Core Functionality

Five Safes TES is a Weave for the secure, remote execution of GA4GH TES analyses in Trusted Research Environments (TREs).

• TRE managers can register environments, create projects, and manage authorised access.
• Researchers can submit GA4GH TES analyses for secure execution within participating TREs.

Built on international open standards from GA4GH and ELIXIR, Five Safes TES uses an enhanced GA4GH Task Execution Service to receive federated analysis requests. This approach supports the essential disclosure control processes within TREs, ensuring outputs are reviewed to prevent disclosive data from leaving secure environments.

Weave Identity

Use in Federated Research

Five Safes TES enables secure cross-TRE federated analytics, where the data remains in place and only the researchers’ analysis code is sent to the data. It is specifically designed to meet the stringent technical and governance constraints of TREs by separating the logical stages of a federated project.

Five Safes TES Analysis Capability

Five Safes TES supports isolated algorithms only.

An algorithm to calculate a statistic is isolated if the algorithm can be broken into subproblems that can be calculated separately at each TRE. These results can be combined to achieve the same result as calculating them on a single, pooled data set.

There are often several different algorithms that can be used to calculate the same statistic, but it is the algorithm, not the statistic which is of importance in determining how it can be federated. In considering several common statistics and algorithms in health informatics, we have produced a table which shows statistics that are known to be calculable in a federated manner using Five Safes TES. Note that this summary gives no regard to disclosure risks or checking of outputs, only the suitability of Five Safes TES for an implementation. This table is not comprehensive, and only encompasses some common analyses in health informatics.

Reference Implementation