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?

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.

For my hundredth article on the Developer Community, I wanted to present something practical, so here's a comprehensive implementation of the GPG Interoperability Adapter for InterSystems IRIS.

Every so often, I would encounter a request for some GPG support, so I had several code samples written for a while, and I thought to combine all of them and add missing GPG functionality for a fairly complete coverage. That said, this Business Operation primarily covers data actions, skipping management actions such as key generation, export, and retrieval as they are usually one-off and performed manually anyways. However, this implementation does support key imports for obvious reasons. Well, let's get into it.

Howdy, Developer Community!

Here’s a fun little formatting problem you may run into when trying to use the RSAEncrypt method of %SYSTEM.Encryption (also useable as $System.Encryption.RSAEncrypt()!), which is documented here:

https://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/documatic/%25CSP.Documatic.cls…

This uses either a certificate or public key per the documentation.  Quote:

Certificate/PublicKey - Either

An X.509 certificate containing the RSA public key to be used for encryption, in PEM encoded or binary DER format.

IRIS can use a KMS (Key Managment Service) as of release 2023.3.  Intersystems documentation is a good resource on KMS implementation but does not go into details of the KMS set up on the system, nor provide an easily followable example of how one might set this up for basic testing.

The purpose of this article is to supplement the docs with a brief explanation of KMS, an example of its use in IRIS, and notes for setup of a testing system on AWS EC2 RedHat Linux system using the AWS KMS.  It is assumed in this document that the reader/implementor already has access/knowledge to set up an AWS EC2 Linux system running IRIS (2023.3 or later), and that they have proper authority to access the AWS KMS and AWS IAM (for creating roles and polices), or that they will be able to get this access either on their own or via their organizations Security contact in charge of their AWS access.

A step by step implementation path to a cross regional stretched IrisCluster with Mirroring using the Intersystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO), Google Cloud Platform, and Tailscale.

I am giving this distraction the code name "Compliment Sandwich" for a reason yet to be realized, but I'd rather the community go right for the jugular shooting holes in a solution that implements wireguard based connectivity for our workloads in general, as I would like to refine it as a fall project leading up to KubeCon in Atlanta and if I miss the mark, Ill get it done before Amsterdam. 

A request came from a customer to estimate how long it would take to encrypt a database with cvencrypt utility.

This question is a little bit like how long is a piece of string — it depends. But its an interesting question. The answer primarily depends on the performance of CPU and storage on the target platform the customer is using, so the answer is more about coming up with a simple methodology that can be used to benchmark the CPU and storage while running cvencrypt.

Methodology

1. Copy a large and representative CACHE.

Overview

Encryption of sensitive data becomes more and more important for applications. For example patient names, SSN, address-data or credit card-numbers etc..

Cache supports different flavors of encryption. Block-level database encryption and data-element encryption. The block-level database encryption protects an entire database.  The decryption/encryption is done when a block is written/read to or from the database and has very little impact on the performance.

With data-element encryption only certain data-fields are encrypted.  Fields that contain sensitive data like patient data or credit-card numbers. Data-element encryption is also useful if a re-encryption is required periodically. With data-element encryption it is the responsibility of the application to encrypt/decrypt the data.

Both encryption methods leverage the managed key encryption infrastructure of Caché.

The following article describes a sample use-case where data-element encryption is used to encrypt person data.  

But what if you have hundreds of thousands of records with an encrypted datafield and you have the need to search that field? Decryption of the field-values prior to the search is not an option. What about indices?

This article describes a possible solution and develops step-by-step a small example how you can use SQL and indices to search encrypted fields. 

About regulations

Personal data privacy regulations have become an indispensable requirement for projects dealing with personal data. The compliance with these laws is based on 4 principles:

1. Compliance with the rights of the holder of personal data;
2. Governance of personal data assets;
3. Privacy by Design and by Default;
4. Data protection.

Several steps should be done in order to secure the connection through xDBC clients to an IRIS Server instance using TLS. Most of the information can be obtained from the documentation about TLS on IRIS here, about configuring the security layer for encrypted connections. In the next paragraphs we will cover an step-by-step guide on how to configure and test the connection using SQL Clients apps using ODBC and JDBC.

In this article, we will establish an encrypted JDBC connection between Tableau Desktop and InterSystems IRIS database using a JDBC driver. While documentation on configuring TLS with Java clients covers all possible topics on establishing an encrypted JDBC connection, configuring it with Tableau might be a little bit tricky, so I decided to write it down.

Securing SuperServer

Before we start with client connections, you need to configure SuperServer, which by default runs on port 1972 and is responsible for xDBC traffic to accept encrypted connections.

Hello,
I am currently facing the task of retrieving or sending HL7 messages from a web API. Since we only send HL7 messages via internal sockets, web APIs are relatively new to me.
The following is my plan for the new interface:
I have created a new custom business service that periodically sends requests to a business process. In this business process, the HTTP request (HTTP.GenericMessage) is then created from scratch. The special feature is the "Authorisation" header field, where a signature is inserted, which consists of a base64-encoded hash value.

The recent announcement of a collision for the SHA-1 hash algorithm has caused some consternation:

https://shattered.io/

Here is some background to help put this in perspective.

Cryptographic hash functions can have a variety of properties.  The property at issue here is:

"Collision resistance - it is computationally infeasible to find any two distinct inputs x, x' which hash to the same output, i.e., such that h(x) = h(x')."

(Menezes, van Oorchot, and Vanstone, "Handbook of Applied Cryptography", section 9.2.

Now I want to return a large amount of data to the front end. The string length has reached 40000 +, and the returned data needs to be encrypted by AES + Base64. I can convert the string into a stream. AES can use the AESCBCEncryptStream method to encrypt, but Base64 has no stream method。Anyone who get the solution  would you kindly share the solution please。

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Working on a project where I'm needing to make FHIR calls from my HealthConnect Interop production to Epic. 

My issue is I'm not able to construct a valid JWT for the OAuth token retrieval that Epic will accept. I have the below code where I'm able to create a valid header and payload that I'm base64URL encoding and then trying to sign with my .pem private key file. However, Epic is not liking the signature portion of my JWT.

As such, I wanted to present my code to see if I'm performing the signature steps correctly? I've seen some posts where the %Net.

Hi, Community! 

Please find the Developer Community Video of the week on InterSystems Developers YouTube Channel:

System Sizing for Insanely Large Deployments

Hello; We are managing several Ensemble instances on several servers.  One server has 4 instances, and two other servers have one instance each (those are production servers).  We encrypt all instances using the Caché encryption in the management portal.

Currently we are using two different encryption keys: 1 key on the server with 4 instances, which is used for all 4 instances, and a second key on single-instance server. ( I'm installing the newest production server now.)

What I'd like to know is what are the best practices for managing encryption keys for separate servers.

Credentials for a Productions are stored as plain text in ^Ens.SecondaryData.Password and exposed as plain text via SQL table Ens_Config.Credentials which is not ideal as only admins should know the credentials.

I can create my own adapter etc... to store and use encrypted passwords but does anyone know if there is a standard way to do this in a Production?

Alternatively, am I missing how to secure this so the production can run and someone can monitor and operate a production without access to the SQL table or global?

Hi everyone,

I have a project which requires the sending of JSON messages to an external service provider using REST. The service provider requires the message contents to be signed.

Their instructions:

1. Add a header called "Date" with the the date and time in a specific format - done
2. Add the client's certificate password in a field in the header - done
3. Create a string which consist of the {Date}{newline}{Password}{newline}{etc}{Message Body}.

Hello all,
we have an encryption problem.

Out partner decode url with AES CBC 256 using crypto-js
https://community.dynatrace.com/t5/Troubleshooting/AES-Encryption-and-D…

with this params value:
var iv = CryptoJS.enc.Hex.parse("0000000000000000");
var stringyouWantToEncrypt = "HelloWorld";
var base64Key = "RXJjb2xpbm9zZW1wcmVpbnBpZWRp";
var encrypted = CryptoJS.AES.encrypt(
    stringyouWantToEncrypt,
    CryptoJS.enc.Base64.parse(base64Key),
    {
        iv: iv,
    }
);
console.log("Key " + CryptoJS.enc.Base64.parse(base64Key));
console.log("Result!

I have an application that is requires an Encoded HL7 message sent over SOAP over HTTPS using SSL/TLS... the Response that is return is also encoded, which I know how to Decode but not sure when I Decode the response how to Extract the HL7 message to send back to the router.

How do I capture the Routing Source System and parse the encoded message back into an HL7 format that would show on the trace viewer?

Below is an example...where I get the response and want to send it back to FeederScottRouting as an HL7 message that can be tied to the Parent ID of the sending request message?

Hi all,

Is there any bcrypt algorithm on HealthShare? We are trying to use it but ww couldn't find it.

Regards

Hello,

Looking for some help on how I actually set the properties to enable tracing for %Net.SSH.Session ?

The doc is here:

https://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/documatic/%25CSP.Documatic.cls…

The values look bitwise in their defaultness and I cant seem to figure out how to enable it in my object (or if I am going about this wrong altogether).  I am troubleshooting an elusive ssh error: unable to exchange encryption keys in a catch at the moment.

Would appreciate a clue if anybody has experience with it... thank you.

-Ron

I would like to know if an encrypted caché database can run significantly slower than a normal "unencrypted" database, in a way that is noticeable to the end user (e.g. slower response time for most pages, especially the ones that rely on read/writing to globals).

I searched in Intersystems knowledge base and couldn't find anything related. I'm looking for possible before/after benchmarks.

Hi,

I have a situation where I write a character stream to a file. The file content gets signed and the signature is sent to a service provider together with the file content.

The signing is done using openssl.

This works perfectly on a dev PC, which is runnning Windows and has a little-endian architecture.

The problem is as soon as I do this on the server, which has a big-endian architecture, the signed value is incorrect according to the service provider.

The content is signed using RSA SHA256 with PSS padding.

I've had a look at $nconvert, $sconvert, etc., but can't get to a solution.

 Requesting assistance on Intersystems Cache Managed Key Encryption.

We have configured the KMIP Server.

The KMIP server is an external HSM box. I was not able to find any info on Key Rotation and what type of encryption does it follow i.e. 1-tier approach or 2-tier approach.

Can someone please assist on the same?

How can we make sure that the Cache userid passwords are encrypted on storage? We want to make sure that the Cache passwords cannot be decrypted - how can we ensure that?

So I have a base string that I want to sign using RSA-SHA256. I have a .p12 file and passphrase to get the RSA Private key using NodeJS (pem.readPkcs12 library), which I don't know how to do that in intersystems as well. (would appreciate if you can include a solution for that too)
The main problem here is I am trying to sign a string and print the result to terminal, using the code below in a routine (.mac file).

I need to create a JWT to connect to EPIC FHIRserver sandbox.

https://fhir.epic.com/Documentation?docId=oauth2&section=BackendOAuth2G…

You will generate a one-time use JSON Web Token (JWT) to authenticate your app to the authorization server and obtain an access token that can be used to authenticate your app's web service calls. There are several libraries for creating JWTs. See jwt.io for some examples.

The header and payload are then base64 URL encoded, combined with a period separating them, and cryptographically signed using the private key to generate a signature.

I need to store an equivalent of the SNN (Social Security number). I need it to be encrypted and I'll have to be able to search for it once stored.

For what I've seen my options are: 

- SHAHash from the %system.encryption library. Simple and easy to implement. My question is, might collisions be a problem? We are talking about a 10 millions entry.

- AES encryption. In this case I'd like to know if there is a standard way for key management in the InterSystems environment.

I can eventually get a certificate for this project to use other encryption function as well.

Open to suggestions.