CERN – The European Organization for Nuclear Research – is the world's largest particle physics centre. It was founded in 1954, as one of Europe's first joint ventures, and do now have 20 member states. At the moment, just under 3000 people are employed by CERN, this being everything from physicists to secretaries. In addition to this, there are about 6500 visiting scientists, that come to CERN to do their research.
Currently, the main focus is on completing and starting the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider. This is a particle accelerator that will accelerate particles to almost the speed of light. Different detectors are built to make the particles visible. The goal of the accelerator is to recreate the environment as it was at the origin of our Universe, and answer such questions as "why do elementary particles have mass?" and "why is their masses different?".
CERN is located on the border between Switzerland and France, with its main site (Meyrin site) in Switzerland, near Geneva. This is where the main computer centre is located. There are also a site in France (Prevessin site), a couple of kilometers from the border, where, among other things, the control centre to the accelerators is located.
The computer facilities at CERN hold a lot of information that is fundamental for the day-to-day run of the organization, such as personnel information and databases holding information about different experiments. This is backed up in a central network backup system (IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager). Additionally, and for total disaster recovery purposes, the most vital part of this data is backed up to an off site server, located in Prevessin.
The services supported by the off site backup system are:
This can be done without contacting an administrator, except when a new user profile is needed. Also, the users are able to access the backed up data at any time, to retrieve the information stored there.
Since the backup server may hold some sensitive information, it is desirable to implement encryption of the stored data. This is the first task for this project. The data should be encrypted/decrypted transparently on the server side, with as little user inconvenience as possible, and the same features should be supported as before the encryption was implemented. We will use TrueCrypt to enable this, and adapt this to meet the system and users requirements.
In addition to the implementation and testing of TrueCrypt, the tasks of this project will be to:
It is a requirement from CERN that the process is continuously documented on the CERN TWiki pages.
