Partial Encryption

[Grahame Grieve <[e-mail]>]

We are getting strong push-back against the use of RESTful APis in
healthcare, particularly in Europe, because there is no support for partial
encryption - that is, where the content is encrypted (and signed) but the
headers are not. SSL does both, obviously. (note: this is in b2b context).

There are some RFCs floating around for encrypting and signing the http
body, instead of (or as well as) using SSL - but these don't seem to have
any penetration.

So I'm increasingly seeing discussion around tunneling RESTful APIs across
SOAP (pr higher level profiles on soap like ebMS), purely for the reason
that they protect the body but not the headers.

I'm interested in whether anyone here can give me a sense of perspective on
where we are - why is content encryption not flying like transport
encryption?

And don't ask stupid questions like, how actually useful are the headers?
This discussion isn't really about functionality but about the ability of
large government backbone administrators to tick the box that they'll have
the control they need, while being able to tick the box that they've
protected the patient's privacy and the healthcare provider's need for
reliability

Grahame


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