Specific interoperability problems of security infrastructure services.

Abstract

Communication and co-operation in healthcare and welfare require a well-defined set of security services based on a standards-based interoperable security infrastructure and provided by a Trusted Third Party. Generally, the services describe status and relation of communicating principals, corresponding keys and attributes, and the access rights to both applications and data. Legal, social, behavioral and ethical requirements demand securely stored patient information and well-established access tools and tokens. Electronic signatures as means for securing integrity of messages and files, certified time stamps and time signatures are important for accessing and storing data in Electronic Health Record Systems. The key for all these services is a secure and reliable procedure for authentication (identification and verification). While mentioning technical problems (e.g. lifetime of the storage devices, migration of retrieval and presentation software), this paper aims at identifying harmonization and interoperability requirements of securing data items, files, messages, sets of archived items or documents, and life-long Electronic Health Records based on a secure certificate-based identification. It's commonly known that just relying on existing and emerging security standards does not necessarily guarantee interoperability of different security infrastructure approaches. So certificate separation can be a key to modern interoperable security infrastructure services.