HL7 FHIR Security

Preliminary reading: HL7 FHIR Integrations in Python

FHIR servers offer their APIs using REST, which in turn means that they are HTTP servers under the hood. As a result, a few common security mechanisms can be employed to secure access to the servers when you invoke them.

• Basic Auth
• OAuth
• SSL/TLS encryption

When you integrate with a FHIR server, consult with its maintainers what of these, if any, should be used.

Note that Basic Auth and OAuth, when used over HTTP, are mutually exclusive. The HTTP protocol reserves only one header, called Authorization, for the authorization credentials and there is no standard way in the protocol to use more than one authorization mechanism.

On the other hand, the SSL/TLS encryption is independent of the credentials used and can be employed with Basic Auth, OAuth, or in scenarios when no authorization header is sent at all.

This is why, when you create or update a FHIR connection, you can set Basic Auth or OAuth and SSL/TLS options independently, as in the screenshot below:

Basic Auth

Basic Auth is a combination of username and password credentials. They are allocated in advance by the maintainers of a FHIR server.

To use them in your integrations, create a new Basic Auth definition in the Dashboard, set its password, and assign it to an existing or new outgoing FHIR connection. No restarts nor reloads are required.

OAuth

Authentication with OAuth is built around a notion of short-lived tokens, which are simple strings. Your Zato server has credentials, much like a username and password although they are called a client ID and secret, based on which an authentication server issues tokens that let Zato prove that in fact it does have the correct credentials and that it is allowed to invoke a particular API as it is defined through scopes.

Scopes can be likened to permissions to access a subset of resources from a FHIR server. When Zato receives a token from an authentication server the token is inherently linked to specific scopes within which it can interact with the FHIR server.

That tokens are short-lived means that they need to be refreshed periodically, e.g. at least once per hour Zato needs to ask the authentication server for a new token based on its credentials. This process takes place under the hood and requires no configuration on your part.

To use OAuth in your integrations, create a new OAuth definition in the Dashboard, set its secret, and assign it to an existing or new outgoing FHIR connection. No restarts nor reloads are required.

SSL/TLS encryption

If the FHIR server that a connection points to uses SSL/TLS then a question arises of how to validate the certificate of the Certificate Authority (CA) that signed the certificate that the FHIR server uses. There are several options:

• Skip validation - the certificate will not be validated at all and it will be always accepted.
• Default bundle - the certificate will have to belong to one of the publicly recognized CAs. The bundle contains the same certificates that common web browsers do so this option is good if the FHIR server is available in the public Internet, e.g. https://fhir.example.com
• Custom bundle - if the FHIR server's certificate was signed by an internal, non-public CA then the CA's certificate bundle, in the PEM format, can be uploaded through the Dashboard to make it possible to choose it when the FHIR connection is being created or updated.

Related topics

• Read the HL7 FHIR and Python introduction
• Start the tutorial
• Read about REST API channels
• More programming examples