On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 10:42, David Forslund wrote:
> Well sure, but you need to do some digging.  All of this is implemented in
> OpenEMed using the open source ORB OpenORB (on sourceforge.net),
> which provides full support for it.  By simply changing the environment,
> we can switch to using SSL and full security and encryption without
> changing our code.   If the application needs to know who the person
> is making the request and the person doing the responding to see
> if they have the right permissions, then the RAD has to be turned on
> which enables the full checking of credentials.  This is all implemented
> and works in CORBA, and is all open source.

Are you saying is that the commonality between users has to be at the
interface level i.e. everyone needs to use CORBA? If so, I think that is
unrealistic.

> Sure, but the issue isn't only security it is what you are using for your 
> underlying
> communications infrastructure. 

We are assuming the Internet i.e. an insecure TCP/IP network.

>  The biggest problem I find is the variation
> in security policies which prevents security interoperatiblity independent
> of whether CORBA is being used or not.    Security interoperability is the
> big challenge.  Adding some new protocol to handle it doesn't help.  Using
> standards does.   It is these standards that we encourage.  For example,
> there is something called CSIv2 which is a standard, and if implemented, 
> enables
> folks to talk together securely including quoting of credentials.  It seems 
> that
> interoperability is so far down on people's list of things that are 
> important that
> it isn't recognized.

I agree, although standards ultimately need to define or nominate
protocols to enable things to be done. CSIv2 seems to be specific to
CORBA and J2EE -is that correct?

The problem is a simple one:
- many thousands of healthcare providers, not organisationally connected
in any particular way except that they serve the same population of
people
- all connected to the Internet, some permanently via broadband, some
intermittently via modem
- many, many disparate systems
- need to be able to exchange HL7 messages and other "payloads" with
each other securely and reliably and as rapidly as possible.
- each healthcare provider's information ssytem needs to be able to
interface with the message transport mechanism via a simple, lightweight
API
- each healthcare provider needs to be able to maintain their own
entries (including public keys) in a shared directory of message
delivery addresses
- a means of validating public keys is required.

Now there are (many) standards for each of the individual parts of this
problem (eg X509). But are there higher-level standards, or
pseudo-standards in use which combine these into a complete
interoperable system? 


-- 

Tim C

PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere
or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc
Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B  EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0


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