On Sun, 2003-12-21 at 06:39, Richard D Piper wrote: > In Australia, there is HESA (http://www.hesa.com.au), which provides > this service. It is just complex to administer and for the end-users to > configure/understand.
Richard, There has been a long, ongoing discussion of PKI, HeSA and HIC, GPG/PGP and related topics on the Australian GPCG-talk (General Practice Computer Group) list over a period of several years. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any net-accessible searchable archives of that list, but I probably have many of the message squirrelled away in my mail archives if you are interested. Some of the deficiencies of the HeSA system have been addressed - such as a simplified user agreement (the original was over 50 pages long) - and client software libraries (for Java I think) which now support Linux and Mac OS X systems as well as Windows. But it is still a closed source system, and still uses dongles or tokens to hold the user's private signing and encryption keys (which has good and bad points - personally I think hardware devices are unnecessary but I concede that secure management of private keys without them is a non-trivial issue). Not sure if facilities for automated look-up of certificate revocation files has improved - that was also a problem. However, the biggest problem of the HeSA system is that they insist on generating key pairs on behalf of the end user, and then (hopefully securely) distributing them to the user. Of course, this modus operandi undermines the entire idea of private keys - that no-one else knows them, not even the certificate or registration authorities. I believe that HeSA may have or be about to give in to pressure to change this. I refuse to consider the HeSA PKI until they allow key pairs to be self-generated (and the public key securely and provably transmitted to the registration and certification authorities for signing and publication). > > > 5. Use a gpg based infrastructure (doesnt easily support web browsers > > and most email clients require lots of setup to use) > > This works on a "web-of-trust", type approach, which may not provide > sufficient security in terms of client identification. I don't think that there is any empirical evidence one way or the other, and from a theoretical point of view, webs of trust can be just as effective as the traditional X.509 hierarchy of trust approach. But both need effort and resources to organise and maintain - they don't just happen. Perhaps you could tell us more about where and how you want to use PKI, maybe with some use cases? Secure communication and identification is certainly an interesting but surprisingly vexatious issue. It is worth looking at how some of the private path labs deliver results to GPs and private specialists. More than one (here in Oz) uses GPG wrapped in a custom built mail/handshaking client (verified deliver is important). Oh, have a look at the Argus project at Uni of Ballarat (Google for it) - which amongst other things provides a wrapper around the HeSA PKI. It is currently free, but was funded to be open source and I gather it will be released as such soon. Tim C > > thanks > > Richard > > > > > > On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 06:26, Richard D Piper wrote: > > > >>I would be grateful for any advise regarding the secure transmission of > >>patient data over the Internet. In Australia there is a PKI > >>infrastructure (HESA) funded by the HIC (Health insurance commission). > >>It works, but is quite complex. > >> > >>I anyone aware of a better, public key cryptography system that could be > >>used for this purpose, or even a PKI system that is successful and > >>widely deployed. > >> > >>thanks > >> > >>Richard -- 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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