Trusted third party services for deploying secure telemedical applications over the WWW

The EUROMED-ETS schema provides a robust security framework for telemedical applications operating over the World Wide Web. It is based on a trusted third party architecture under which certificate authorities store the public-key certificates of participating hospitals and medical practitioners. Digital signatures are used to provide peer and data origin authentication, and, in combination with access control lists, to provide access control. The deployed infrastructure is based on off-the-shelf available clients and servers, and provides functions for electronic registration of participants, session initialisation, user authentication, key generation and personalisation, certificate generation, distribution, storage and retrieval, certificate revocation lists, and auditing. It was found that, as the underlying technologies mature, a Web-based trusted third party architecture provides a viable solution for delivering secure telemedical applications.