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Most medical, biological and social studies face the problem of storing information about subjects for research purposes without violating the subject's privacy. In most cases it is not possible to remove all information that could be linked to a subject, because some of this information is needed for the research itself. This fact holds especially for longitudinal studies, which collect data about a subject at different times and places. Longitudinal studies need to link different data about a specific subject, collected at different times for research and administration use. In this paper we present the security concept proposed for sesam, a longitudinal interdisciplinary study that analyses the social, biological and psychological risk factors for the development of psychological diseases. Our security concept is based on pseudonymisation, encrypted data transfer and an electronic data custodianship. This paper is mainly a case study and some of the security problems emerged in the context of sesam may not occur in other studies. Nevertheless we believe that an adopted version of our approach could be used in other application scenarios as well.

sesam: Ensuring Privacy for a Interdisciplinary Longitudina...

sesam: Ensuring Privacy for a Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study

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