RT LIVE v2 Data security
When talking to customer's about the RT LIVE v2 a common question is about data security, this page is intended to address those concerns.
Firstly it’s a common request that the data from RT LIVE v2 is not stored on "the internet" at all, but instead there is a data connection directly from the RT LIVE v2 unit to a "desktop PC", and so not involving an Internet server at all. However such a configuration is not practical for several reasons. The main difficulty is that this would require accepting an incoming data connection from the internet to the PC, which would be a huge security concern and unacceptable in most cases. In addition there are other practical considerations, such as needing a static IP address for the PC and also ensuring it was always on ready to communicate. Because of these issues all wireless telemetry systems use an intermediate Internet server to handle communications.
For the RT LIVE v2 system there are 2 servers that are involved. Firstly there is the dedicated Race Technology server. This sever looks after all communications with the RT LIVE v2 unit, and also generates the web pages to the user. However user’s data is not stored on the Race Technology server. The data is stored on the Amazon S3 data cloud, at the time of write this was the largest provider or cloud storage. The service is used by 1000's of blue chip multinationals, public bodies and financial institutions worldwide. The data is currently stored on servers based in the USA.
Using a professional cloud service means that the data storage is more scalable and more secure. All the data is stored on multiple S3 cloud servers, and designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.
All data transfers are managed from Race Technology's own dedicated server, the user has no direct interaction with the S3 cloud server.
All data transfers between the Amazon S3 cloud server, the Race Technology server, and the user’s PC use SSL encrypted data links. This is the same type of data encryption as used for all secure transactions over the internet.
Only raw binary data is stored on the cloud server, any meta-data that can be used to identify the data are stored separately on the dedicated Race Technology server.
By default all the data is stored on Race Technology's own S3 account, however if needed the user is able to specify their own account as an alternative. Again another common request is "can we use our own server". This is impractical as there is no standard cloud storage API, so using an alternative server would involve a considerable amount of engineering work.
All the data is only available via the users account, and the users own password is needed to access this account. The users password is stored in one-way encrypted format on our server, and cannot be read back by Race Technology, it is however possible to reset this password in the case that it is lost. The data for a particular account is not accessible to any other user.