ENTRUSTing WfExS 1.0 with WES and TES

Omics data analysis is a cornerstone of personalized medicine, yet handling sensitive datasets across distributed systems presents challenges in security, reproducibility, and data reusability. WfExS-backend 1.0 addresses these challenges as a high-level workflow engine orchestrator designed for secure and reproducible workflow execution analyses within isolated and containerized environments. Supporting workflow engines like Nextflow and cwltool ensures reproducibility, achieved through the usage of Workflow Run RO-Crate representations. Secured storage executions leverage FUSE-encrypted directories to protect sensitive inputs, intermediate results, and outputs. WfExS-backend 1.0 also facilitates seamless data deposition into private (Nextcloud, B2DROP) and public (Zenodo, Dataverse, B2SHARE) repositories.

This poster presents the WfExS-backend 1.0 release, showcasing its role in building the core of a Secure Processing Environment (SPE) through the adoption of GA4GH standards like the Workflow Execution Service (WES), the Task Execution Service (TES) and the encrypted file format (Crypt4GH). Those elements aim to ensure compliance with the legal constraints imposed on the use of health-related data through SPEs, according to recently approved regulations like the Data Governance Act and the European Health Data Space (EHDS).

The release of version 1.0 represents a major milestone for this software project, as the next developments will focus on the integration of GA4GH WES and TES following the current activities of the EU-funded EOSC-ENTRUST project, which aims to establish a European network of Trusted Research Environments for handling sensitive data and promoting European interoperability through a common framework for federated data access, analysis and governance, which should ease federated analysis scenarios.