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About Airlock

Work on Airlock is still in progress

Airlock is a new tool for managing the output release request and review process. While Airlock is in initial development stages, a combination of the current and new (Airlock) process will be maintained.

What is OpenSAFELY Airlock?🔗

Airlock is a service running inside the secure environment to allow researchers to view output files, create release requests, and for output checkers to review and release these requests.

Researchers use the Airlock UI to view their workspace files, create a new release request, add their files to the release and submit them for review. Researchers can only have at most one open release request per workspace, but files can be organised by the researchers into logical groups when constructing the request.

They can then either reject the request as a whole or release the files to the job-server (implicitly approving the request as a whole).

Airlock allows us to enforce some safety controls and policies automatically. This includes things such as the number of required reviews, and ensuring that researchers who are also output checkers are not able to review their own requests.

Accessing Airlock🔗

Airlock is only supported in Chrome

Please ensure you use Chrome when accessing Airlock. Features may not work as expected in other browsers.

To access the Airlock system:

  1. Obtain a Single Use Token via the Jobs website.
  2. Log into Level 4 and navigate to Airlock in Chrome. Airlock is accessed at https://<backend>.backends.opensafely.org. e.g. on the TPP backend, go to https://tpp.backends.opensafely.org.
  3. Log in using your GitHub username or email and the single use token.

(Note: Airlock is not supported on browsers other than Chrome.)

Viewing files🔗

Users can view medium privacy outputs from any workspace they have permission to access (workspaces for which they have the Project Developer role) via Airlock if:

  • They have access to log into the backend (they must be accessing Airlock from a browser in the chosen backend)
  • The backend has Airlock installed and running.