Norwegian Institute of Public Health Our would like to use Limesurvey in a national survey. However, the institute requires a risk assessment of LimeSurvey before giving permission to use it. The risk assessment will particularly be related to secure identification of participants and access and storage of data.
Can you please provide information about data security related to the following issues:

If using the professional hosting:
- Security access: Who has access to the data?
- Data access: How is data accessed?
- Authentication: How will participants authenticate to get access to the questionnaire?

If storing data locally on the computer:
- Are the data stored encrypted?
- Where will the encryption key be stored and who will have access to the key?

Best regards, YlvaFHI

For questions about the professional hosting, you should get in touch with the support at Limesurvey GmbH. They are not always reading posts on the forum here.

Authentication: How will participants authenticate to get access to the questionnaire?

Participants generally do not authenticate at all, especially when the survey is annonymous. You can use tokens, then they can access the survey only by clicking on the individual token link (sent to them via email) or by inserting the token when asked. But there are many different ways to distribute your survey. without know how you will distribute your survey, it is hard to say how "participants will authenticate to get access", because you could also provide just a simple link to everyone (you won't know who answered) or via individual token links (you might be able to identify who gave the answer), etc.

So this is nothing anyone can give you information about, but you. You will need to know how you want to let respondents access the survey and then see what options there are in Limesurvey.

Storing data locally on the computer is your responsibility. This is what you need to figure out yourself. The data file you download is not encrypted. You need to make sure to encrypt it on your computer, if this is a requirement.