Research Article
On the Usage of SAML Delegate Assertions in an Healthcare Scenario with Federated Communities
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-23635-8_27, author={Massimiliano Masi and Roland Maurer}, title={On the Usage of SAML Delegate Assertions in an Healthcare Scenario with Federated Communities}, proceedings={Electronic Healthcare. Third International Conference, eHealth 2010, Casablanca, Morocco, December 13-15, 2010, Revised Selected Papers}, proceedings_a={E-HEALTH}, year={2012}, month={10}, keywords={Healthcare Professionals Authentication Direct Brokered Trust Security}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-23635-8_27} }- Massimiliano Masi
Roland Maurer
Year: 2012
On the Usage of SAML Delegate Assertions in an Healthcare Scenario with Federated Communities
E-HEALTH
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-23635-8_27
Abstract
The importance of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) has been addressed in recent years by governments and institutions. Many large scale projects have been funded with the aim to allow healthcare professionals to consult patients data in different organizations. Concepts like interoperability, security and confidentiality are the key for the success for these projects. The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative promotes the coordinated use of established standards for authenticated and secure EHR exchange amongst clinics and hospitals or even regions. For these scenarios, the problem of having authenticated transactions is crucial, in order to provide a form of authorization while accessing patient healthcare information. The IHE initiative addresses the problem by mean of SAML assertions, i.e. XML documents containing authentication statements. In this paper, we focus on the problem of propagating the authentication information of healthcare professionals amongst hospitals or regions (in the IHE jargon, ) by relying on the delegation mechanism introduced by SAML.