[Openid-specs-heart] "Individual-to-NPE" sharing episodes in UMA use cases, and "design pattern" solution options

[Meyer, Gunther]

Hi All!



First off, thank you for letting me participate in this discussion.  And please excuse the Newbie questions or suggestions!



From a sharing of information point of view, if I put myself in the shoes of a patient, I see that sharing information with an individual makes sense, with the following provisions

1.       If the provider is not available, someone else that is their proxy must be able to access it.

2.       I may not know the provider, for example if this is the first time at the practice (might be an edge case?)



As to the “group” concept, I did not want to get into the middle of a debate.  I just wanted to point out that larger practices or hospital often consider sharing in terms of groups of users rather than individuals, and would therefore be more comfortable with a sharing model that involved groups. Therefore it is just something we need to consider (though we might reject is as impractical)



Could someone please share the link to the BLT presentation, that sounded very interesting.



Also, I think that the point that the application, C, might have to be better defined seems to have merit, unless the patient just authorizes the Hospital?



Finally, I think that the patient sharing with an individual doctor is interesting if the user’s intent can be preserved during the import process.  I think very few users, however, will express much more than the default “share with anyone as needed for treatment” consent.  Therefore, once the information is shared with NYP, as discussed, it will be imported and then the organizational security and policies will kick in.



Regards



Gunther



Gunther Meyer | Architect
Allscripts | 8529 Six Forks Road | Raleigh, NC |27615


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gunther.meyer at allscripts.com | www.allscripts.com<http://www.allscripts.com/>

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From: Openid-specs-heart [mailto:openid-specs-heart-bounces at lists.openid.net] On Behalf Of Eve Maler
Sent: Monday, October 19, 2015 4:00 PM
To: openid-specs-heart at lists.openid.net
Subject: [Openid-specs-heart] "Individual-to-NPE" sharing episodes in UMA use cases, and "design pattern" solution options



I promised to write this up, and hopefully I'll make it before the deadline of today's call.



The subject line introduces what I hope will be useful consistent wording for discussing these sorts of topics. Some of our UMA use cases include episodes of party-to-party resource sharing that involve a resource owner who is an individual (say, a patient or consumer), and a requesting party that is, or is the agent of, a "non-person entity" or NPE, such as a hospital, government agency, or company.



Staying entirely within the confines of the UMA protocol, a number of different "design patterns" could be chosen for deployment. Agreeing on which reasons to use which patterns, and locking down any areas of variability, could help make systems interoperate with each other. The UMA protocol, in fact, expects such variability and recommends profiling to improve interoperability. Thus, it seems a good idea for us to figure out how much such types of interop are in scope for us, and likely do some profiling in these areas.



Here are four patterns I can think of:

1.      Individual-to-agent-of-NPE: Alice the individual RO shares with "the individual RqP who can prove they control the identifier 'Dr. Bob'" (possible also constraining the client in use as well -- we'll leave that part out for this analysis).
2.      Individual-to-NPE: Alice the individual RO shares with "the NPE RqP that can prove they control the identifier 'New York Presbyterian Hospital'". Some process yet to be determined, possibly involving "chained delegation", ensures that Dr. Bob and possibly others who work for NYP get access thereafter.
3.      Individual-to-role: Alice the individual RO shares with "any RqP who can prove they have been assigned the role 'works for NYP'".
4.      Individual-to-individual: Alice the individual RO shares with "the individual RqP who can prove they control the identifier 'bob at gmail'" (whom she knows is her doctor because he provisioned her with that gmail handle). Bob might do "chained delegation" to share the resource with himself as an employee of NYP.

The reason interop questions arise is because the process of UMA trust elevation involves things like claims-gathering and possibly step-up authentication, and the policy-setting options presented to Alice (which are out of band of UMA, but nonetheless...) need to be driven by these requirements. The ability of the requesting sides to respond appropriately will be triggered off of expectations about what they'll be asked to cough up for trust elevation.



Each pattern has pros and cons. Briefly:

*       The one I'm least enamored of is #3; enterprise access control has had so much trouble with RBAC, so can we expect adding UMA to help? :-)
*       Chained delegation can be very powerful. In environments where everybody uses the same UMA authorization server, a number of nice value-add features can be supported, but they tend to break down (at least with UMA V1.0.x) when you add the ability for every RO to choose their own AS.
*       I worry about sharing with individual doctors. It's very expedient, so people will tend to do it as a path of least resistance (think Google Apps!). And sometimes maybe it's the right answer, particularly if "chained delegation" can allow Alice to track where her resource has been shared further. But what if Dr. Bob leaves the hospital/practice/whatever? Is this always the right answer?
*       Sharing with an NPE sounds elegant -- it's what a recent POC of my acquaintance did. But the "process yet to be determined" mentioned above wasn't actually determined yet, so there's that. :-) And you have the problem of a system administrator who has privileged identity credentials to the NPE account -- as always -- having the key to a pretty valuable kingdom. Maybe a cool mitigation of this risk is to go with sharing with individuals and tracking sharing chains?

Eve Maler
ForgeRock Office of the CTO | VP Innovation & Emerging Technology
Cell +1 425.345.6756 | Skype: xmlgrrl | Twitter: @xmlgrrl
Join our ForgeRock.org OpenUMA<http://forgerock.org/openuma/> community!

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