Accessing securely a corporate eHealth community through social media identities

Abstract

Authentication in companies is a recurring problem. This problem is even more crucial in the medical world where, on the one hand, we have medical confidentiality and, on the other hand, we need fast access to the patient’s records. As social media progressively infiltrate human activity, they could be a solution to this dual problem. We have developed a JAVA web application which, based on the authentication and the security inherent in these networks, allows users to authenticate themselves through media such as Facebook and Google or resorting to a key like the SuisseID. The Single Sign-On principle and the SAML standard are the drivers of the resulting authentication. Single Sign-On solves the problem of forgetting/losing multiple passwords, promoting fast and easy connection. Our application is able to authenticate a user by means of their username and password derived either from the main account of the application or from their attributes on an external account such as Facebook, previously coupled to their main account. The application can directly create an account on the basis of an external «social» account. The pairing between the social account and an account internal to our application enables the Single Sign-On mechanism which, in the medical world, will accelerate the access to patient records. Our application provides strong authentication as well as a Single Sign-On property. Its design is open to various new identity providers. An interesting future perspective.