#Authentication

Created by Daniel Kutac, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Warning: if you get confused by URLs used: the original series used screens from machine called dk-gs2016. The new screenshots are taken from a different machine. You can safely treat url WIN-U9J96QBJSAG as if it was dk-gs2016.

Part 2. Authorization server, OpenID Connect server

In the previous part of this short series, we have learned about simple use case – acting as an OAUTH[1] client. Now, it’s time to bring our experience to a whole new level.

Taking advantage of the Quiniela ML application and as we indicated in the previous article, we are going to explain how we can perform a JWT authentication between our frontend developed in Angular and our backend developed in InterSystems IRIS.

I remind you of the architecture of our QuinielaML project:

Usually it is a cumbersome process in web applications to develop the administration and management of user access, but in our case InterSystems IRIS simplifies the process by providing us with all the infrastructure we need.

This article, and following two articles of the series, is intended as a user guide for developers or system administrators, who need to work with OAuth 2.0 framework (further referred to as OAUTH for simplicity) in their InterSystems product based applications.

One of the most common kinds of integration we are asked to do is emailing. One of the most typical email services our customers use is Microsoft’s Office 365. After setting up the right configuration on the Microsoft side, we can email from IRIS with two HTTP requests. By the end of this article, we will be able to send an email with an attachment through our Microsoft 365 service!

Microsoft’s REST API, called Graph, allows you to do a lot of things within Microsoft’s various apps, and it is precisely what we will employ to send our email.

It is a recommended security practice to login into sensitive Administrator Portals without any input passwords. Thus, it is necessary to identify and authenticate the users correctly. A common technique employed by web portals and mobile applications is to use Google social login. Today, Google Gmail has 2 billion users (source: https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/gmail-stats). Therefore, it is a perfect shared login service to utilize to login InterSystems IRIS users when they need to manage their instances. This article will detail all the steps to embed Google Login into your InterSystems Management Portal.

Register your InterSystems instance in the Google Console

1. Go to https://console.cloud.google.com and log in with your Google user account.
2. On the header click Select a project:

In this article I will explain how to Authenticate, Authorize and Audit by code by using CSP Web Application along with Enabling /Disabling and Authenticate/Unauthenticate any Web Application.

• Online Demo is available on cloud https://dappsecurity.demo.community.intersystems.com/csp/user/index.csp (SuperUser | SYS)
• I recommend to watch the video before continue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFRa3njqDcA

Application Layout
 

As a part of the IRIS Python 2024 contest, my colleague Damir and I went with an idea to build a platform called ShelterShare for connecting victims and volunteers for shelter requests . To do so we chose django as a framework and proceeded to build the first version with 3 different docker containers, django, iris and nginx which would then utilize IRIS as a pure Database engine via the beautifly composed django_iris (cudos to Dimitry). As we were progressing fast, we decided to explore the option of running it within the same container as IRIS by utilizing WSGI added in 2024.1.

In this tutorial, I will discuss how can you connect your IRIS data platform to sql server db  .

Prereq: 

• Have ODBC driver installed in your device. You can download it from here: Download ODBC Driver for SQL Server - ODBC Driver for SQL Server | Microsoft Learn. 
• Have SQL Server and IRIS installed in your device
• Have SQL Server connection Authentication enabled in SQL server

Your may not realize it, but your InterSystems Login Account can be used to access a very wide array of InterSystems services to help you learn and use InterSystems IRIS and other InterSystems technologies more effectively.  Continue reading to learn more about how to unlock new technical knowledge and tools using your InterSystems Login account.  Also - after reading, please participate in the Poll at the bottom, so we can see how this article was useful to you!

What is an InterSystems Login Account?

What is JWT?

JWT (JSON Web Token) is an open standard (RFC 7519) that offers a lightweight, compact, and self-contained method for securely transmitting information between two parties. It is commonly used in web applications for authentication, authorization, and information exchange.

A JWT is typically composed of three parts:

1. JOSE (JSON Object Signing and Encryption) Header
2. Payload
3. Signature

These parts are encoded in Base64Url format and concatenated with dots (.) separating them.

The objective of the article is to provide the reader with the following informations:

• Configure and use the FHIR server
• Create an OAuth2 Authorization Server
• Bind the FHIR server to the OAuth2 Authorization Server for support of SMART on FHIR
• Use the interoperability capabilities of IRIS for Health to filter FHIR resources
• Create a custom operation on the FHIR server

Schema of the article:

Introduction

In the modern digital age, securing applications, particularly those handling sensitive health data, is paramount. The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of such data are crucial, necessitating robust security measures. Two-factor authentication (2FA) stands out as a critical enhancement in safeguarding access, adding an extra layer of security beyond just passwords. Recognizing the significance of this feature, InterSystems provides built-in support for 2FA in its database solutions. This tutorial aims to guide you through the process of configuring two-factor authentication in your InterSystems environment, ensuring that your data remains secure and accessible only to authorized users.

    In the previous article, I had just started working with Arduino, and got a meteorological station to show as a result. In this article, let's go further: we will set  up authentication via RFID cards and Arduino against the InterSystems Caché  application.

When I was younger (a question about exactly how much younger is outside the scope of this article), the word “token” meant fun. You see, just a couple of times a year, I would get to go to an arcade and play some amusing video games with my friends.

These days, tokens signify security. JSON Web Token (JWT) Authentication has become one of the most popular standards for securing REST APIs. Fortunately for IRIS users, we have a straightforward way to set up applications to be protected this way. Yet, the idea is still similar to my old arcade days.

It's almost a year since I have published a series of articles explaining how to configure Cache instance as a client / resource server / authorization server. By that time, the implementation of OAuth 2.0 was still a pre-release software.

With the advent of Cache version 2017.1 a lot has changed. OAuth 2.0 implementation is fully completed and supported. Numerous new features were added (e.g. dynamic client registration)  - see release notes here for full details - and configuration pages have been redesigned to a great extent as well.

When a company is quite large and many different applications used by employees. But while those applications are mostly completely different, how to make it possible to not force users to enter credentials as many times as many applications they would like to use. The best way is to use SSO, so, it will be possible to have a portal, where users could launch any application used in a company. There are many different ways how to give access to your application by using the SSO mechanism, and some of them are:

• OAuth2
• Kerberos
• SAML

InterSystems already supports OAuth2 and can be quite easily deal with Kerberos. But I would like to discuss about using SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language).

Also in previous versions you could define your FHIR Server to accept requests via OAuth 2.0 (e.g. for a SMART on FHIR client) but nowadays with v2024.3, which was released a while ago, there is a new feature, that enables doing this more easily - the OAuth FHIR Client QuickStart.

The %CSP.Login class is the utility class provided by InterSystems IRIS to do custom login pages. If you want to control your IRIS application authentication UI, you must extend %CSP.Login and override some methods according to your needs. This article is going to detail those methods and what you can do with them. In addition to that, you will get an explanation of the delegated authentication mechanism provided by ZAUTHENTICATE.mac routine.

Recently I got into a situation where a user had some roles, which granted additional roles, and so on.

As I did not understand where a particular permission came from, I wrote this code which gets an initial set of roles and unwraps them recursively, accounting for any repeats.

I have started working on utilizing Epic on FHIR about a month ago.

Creating a Public Private Key Pair

mkdir /home/ec2-user/path_to_key
openssl genrsa -out ./path_to_key/privatekey.pem 2048

For backend apps, you can export the public key to a base64 encoded X.509 certificate named publickey509.pem using this command...

openssl req -new -x509 -key ./path_to_key/privatekey.pem -out ./path_to_key/publickey509.pem -subj '/CN=medbank'

where '/CN=medbank' is the subject name (for example the app name) the key pair is

Have you ever thought of creating your own systems for editing users or, perhaps, even an API that you can call? Today, you’re going to join me in the %SYS namespace and get to know Security.Users! 

This class has forty properties, many of which you’ve seen before in the System Management Portal. There are class methods for manipulating most of those properties. Every method in this class is a class method, and in most of them, the username is passed as an argument. These methods can be used when you do not want to open and directly manipulate the user’s objects, which is a bad idea anyway!

Here in %SYS, we have already examined users, resources, and roles. Now that we know how to set all of that up, we should give it a purpose. Next we will talk about applications! As you may expect, we will see various identical class methods defined here that we have seen in the previous classes. However, some of them will have some tiny yet significant differences.

Imagine that your .NET project uses the Caché DBMS and you need a fully-functional and reliable authorization system. Writing such a system from scratch would not make much sense, and you will clearly want to use something that already exists in .NET, e.g. ASP.NET Identity. By default, however, this framework supports only its native DBMS – MS SQL. Our task was to create an adaptor that would let us quickly and easily port Identity to the InterSystems Caché DBMS. This work resulted in creation of the ASP.NET Identity Caché Provider.

MSSQL is the default data provider for ASP.

What is TLS?

TLS, the successor to SSL, stands for Transport Layer Security and provides security (i.e. encryption and authentication) over a TCP/IP connection. If you have ever noticed the "s" on "https" URLs, you have recognized an HTTP connection "secured" by SSL/TLS. In the past, only login/authorization pages on the web would use TLS, but in today's hostile internet environment, best practice indicates that we should secure all connections with TLS.

Why use TLS?

So, why would you implement TLS for HL7 connections?

In this article we are going to see how we can use the WhatsApp instant messaging service from InterSystems IRIS to send messages to different recipients. To do this we must create and configure an account in Meta and configure a Business Operation to send the messages we want.

Let's look at each of these steps in more detail.

Setting up an account on Meta

This is possibly the most complicated point of the entire configuration, since we will have to configure a series of accounts until we can have the messaging functionality.

Here you can read the official Meta documentation.

As many of you, our partners, are more widely using modern UI frameworks to create client front-end, you may have encountered a question, "So how do I secure my data when I just finished developing all new fancy browser based client experience?"

The answer is easy. Use a standard, proven OAuth2 and OpenID!

"OK, but how can I do it? I have never done it before."

No problem, just have a look here, if your client is Angular (not AngularJS) based, there is a demo project available for you to review and get inspired!

Over the past couple of months, I have been working on the SMART on FHIR EHR Launch to test the capabilities of IRIS for Health using two open-source apps from CSIRO: SMART-EHR-Launcher and SMART Forms App. This journey has been incredibly interesting, and I’m truly grateful for the opportunity to work on this task and explore more of IRIS for Health’s potential.

After successfully demonstrating the seamless launch of multiple external SMART apps at the HL7 AU FHIR Connectathon, I’m excited to share what I’ve learned with the community.

This scenario showed up yesterday at a client site when I was delivering bespoke consultation on migration from Studio to VS Code.

The site's servers had been configured to use delegated authentication, but the "Delegated" checkbox hadn't been set against the /api/atelier web application, which is what the members of the InterSystems ObjectScript Extension Pack use to make their connections.

As soon as the we application got its checkbox set and the Server Manager refresh button was clicked, namespaces could be enumerated on the server.

At hackathons that InterSystems participated and I supported, many students were asking how all their teammates could use the same IRIS database that they spun up in a container. I suggested using ngrok to expose their localhost IRIS and realized we don't have documentation on that. Hence, I thought this would be great to let more people knwo about this powerful technique for enhancing collaboration during development and testing.

Step-by-Step Guide to Exposing InterSystems IRIS with ngrok

This guide will walk you through the process of exposing your local InterSystems IRIS instance using ngrok.

In your Interoperability Production you could always have a Business Operation that is an HTTP client, that uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication, but you had to customize the Operation for this authentication methodology. Since v2024.3, which was lately released, there is a new capability, providing new settings, to handle this more easily.