Remote access- data security

Question

[Filago]

Hello,

this might be maybe a little off-topic, but maybe it's not. For my PhD I am working with patient data, which is stored on a linux pc. However, I would like to work from remote. Now the question is which tool to use for this. Ofc. I first thought about teamviewer/vnc, but those are only freely available for private computers. Another idea was chrome remote desktop, but I think I don't want to use a "google" application if it comes to patient data. SSH would also be an option, but I favor having a graphical user interface. Which software are you using?

Best,

Andreas

Answer 1

[ATpoint]

I recommend to contact the IT department of your institution and ask for legal advise. After all, it does not really matter what anyone here will say as there could be local restrictions to your patient data so be safe and check that out with the local authorities. Often in my experience the local institutions even have dedicated solutions for problems like that that one is simply not aware of, so lets not reinvent the wheel.

Answer 2

[bernatgel]

I agree with ATpoint to contact with your IT department and ask for advise, and I would add formal permission.

Aside from that, from a technical perspective, I'm really happy with xpra (https://xpra.org/) used over ssh. For me it works much better than X over ssh.

You can run GUI applications on the server machine and connect and disconnect from them freely. In my case I have a few sessions running, one for each main project, and when I connect to them about 10 GUI windows (including a few terminal emulators) open in my client window and I can resume working on my project right away. Really recommend that for remote work.