#Security

5 Followers · 348 Posts

Security in IT is the protection of computer systems from the theft and damage to their hardware, software or information, as well as from disruption or misdirection of the services they provide.

See the InterSystems Documentation on Security.

Question Tani Frankel · Feb 1, 2024

Is it possible to authenticate an xDBC (ODBC/JDBC) connection to InterSystems IRIS via (a 3rd party) OAuth server?

For REST APIs this is possible, but could this be achieved with OAuth? 

Out-of-the-box the ODBC/JDBC Drivers don't seem to have this option, but maybe some custom code could enable this? perhaps via Delegated Authentication and some OAuth classes customization, or some other way?

Has anyone done this already and can share how it was implemented, or someone with some guideline suggestions?

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Article Mainza Kangombe · Jun 6 4m read

Healthcare billing isn’t a pipeline. It’s a conversation about trust. 

Every day, millions of clinical transactions flow from doctors’ keyboards to insurance ledgers. Standard health IT systems are built to count these transactions. They store them. They organize them. 

They route them. But standard systems don't notice them. 

We’ve built faster and faster databases to process claims, but we forgot to ask: Does this claim make sense? 

Because we don’t ask in real-time, we’ve accepted a compromise. We pay first, wait six months, and then hire forensic auditors to find the mistakes.

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Question Kurro Lopez · May 25

Hello everyone.

After trying to run Python methods in the intersystemsdc/irishealth-community Docker container, which no longer allows any Python methods to be executed, I decided to abandon this version and start working with containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris-community.

In this environment, the Python methods work, which was a significant improvement.

I'm trying to import my libraries with pip install -r requirements.txt

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Discussion Ethan Calloway · May 20

 What logging and auditing strategies are commonly recommended for InterSystems IRIS environments?

I’m interested in learning about best practices for tracking user activity, troubleshooting issues, monitoring integrations, and maintaining compliance in enterprise or healthcare systems.

Are there built-in tools or external integrations that work especially well for this purpose?

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Discussion Ethan Calloway · May 20

 I’m currently working with REST APIs in InterSystems IRIS and would like to better understand the recommended security practices for production environments.

I’m especially interested in:

  • Authentication and authorization methods
  • Token management strategies
  • Role-based access control
  • API gateway recommendations
  • Encryption and secure communication practices
  • Monitoring and logging for API activity

I would also appreciate learning about common mistakes to avoid when deploying APIs publicly or integrating with external systems.

What approaches or tools have worked best in your environments?

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Job Victor Gordillo · May 14

Key Responsibilities & Requirements

Core Infrastructure & Cloud Management

  • Full-Stack Administration: Maintain and optimize both Linux (Ubuntu/RHEL) and Windows Server environments.
  • Cloud Orchestration: Take full ownership of VM cloud infrastructure, including provisioning, health monitoring, backup and resource scaling.
  • Policy Governance: Design and enforce comprehensive SysAdmin and Deployment policies (CI/CD pipelines, automated provisioning, and security hardening).

InterSystems Database Administration

  • Platform Expertise: Expert-level administration of both InterSystems IRIS and Caché.
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Article José Pereira · May 10 15m read

Data privacy regulations such as GDPR, LGPD, and HIPAA demand that organizations know exactly where Personally Identifiable Information (PII) lives inside their databases. Yet in practice, most teams rely on manual inventories, tribal knowledge, or external scanning tools that require data to leave the database engine — a process that itself creates privacy and security risks.

This article presents an MVP that takes a different approach: it runs PII detection inside InterSystems IRIS using Embedded Python, analyzing data where it lives and never exporting it to an external process.

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Question John Murray · May 4

As an experiment in agentic coding in ObjectScript I'm using VS Code to try and create an implementation of an SFTP server.

SFTP is built on top of SSH, so the first phase involves implementing an SSH server. While working on the KEX part of that the agent (using GPT-5.3-Codex) reported:

  1. IRIS has what we already need for signing and hashing: RSASHASign, RSASHAVerify, RSAGetLastError, SHAHash, SHA1Hash, SHA3Hash.
  2. It does not list a Diffie-Hellman key exchange or modular exponentiation API in %SYSTEM.Encryption.

It then offered these options:

  1. Keep using IRIS APIs for cert/key/sign/hash.
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Article David Hockenbroch · Apr 28 2m read

. . . you are not alone. 

Help is available.

This took me a while to figure out, and I assume there may be others struggling too. I made my way through all the Entra stuff to set up a client credentials workflow to send email through a Microsoft 365 account. I was able to successfully retrieve my token, but I couldn't ever get it to authenticate with the SMTP server using the %Net.SMTP class. There were two parts to fixing this.

First, the authenticator's access token needs to be more than JUST the access token. It has to be formatted as:

set smtp.authenticator.AccessToken = "user="_emailaddress_$C(1)_"auth=Bearer "_token_$C(1,1)
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Article Tani Frankel · Apr 26 1m read

A very important feature for HL7 FHIR has been introduced with the release of v2026.1 - the support for SMART on FHIR v2 fine-grained granular Scopes.

This enables you to be much stricter and more accurate in the access you provide to the data in your FHIR repository.

Part of this new support is to refuse requests that don't match the scopes, but an even more interesting ability is to filter the results according to the provided scopes.

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Article Ash Sherzhanov · Jul 31, 2025 3m read

SQL injection remains one of the most critical vulnerabilities in database-driven applications, allowing attackers to manipulate queries and potentially access or compromise sensitive data. In InterSystems IRIS, developers have access to both Dynamic SQL and Embedded SQL, each with distinct characteristics. Understanding how to use them securely is essential for preventing SQL injection.

The Problem: Dynamic SQL and SQL Injection

Dynamic SQL constructs queries as strings at runtime. While this offers flexibility, it also creates a vulnerability if user input is not handled correctly.

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Nov 9, 2023 3m read

With the release of InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL, we're getting more frequent questions about how to establish secure connections over JDBC and other driver technologies. While we have nice summary and detailed documentation on the driver technologies themselves, our documentation does not go as far to describe individual client tools, such as our personal favourite DBeaver. In this article, we'll describe the steps to create a secure connection from DBeaver to your Cloud SQL deployment.

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Article Richard Rael · Jan 22, 2024 7m read

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.

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Article Ashok Kumar Thangavel · Feb 17, 2025 6m read

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.

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Question Scott Roth · Jan 2

There is a Master Table within IRIS that I am populating from Epic but want to share it with our Enterprise Application Development Team (Web). As a test I was able to use _SYSTEM from postman to execute the following.

POST /api/atelier/v1/xxxx/action/query HTTP/1.1
Host: xxxxxxxx
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: ••••••
Cookie: CSPSESSIONID-SP-443-UP-api-atelier-=00f0000000000AKyLjBfUvU$MpFD8UT8y$EoNKNw1ixZeXN4_Q; CSPWSERVERID=hzZAT5rb
Content-Length: 86

{"query": "SELECT * FROM osuwmc_Epic_Clarity.DepartmentMaster WHERE ID = '300000000'"}
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Article John Murray · Dec 15, 2025 1m read

It was encouraging to see more people building VS Code extensions for the recent contest. However I noticed that of of the three extensions requiring credentials with which to make their connections only mine, gj :: dataLoader, leverages the long-established and officially-supported InterSystems Server Manager extension to obtain the connection definitions and to handle credentials securely.

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