| 177 | 179 | The possibility exists within an openEHR EHR to digitally sign each Version in a Versioned object (i.e. for each Version of any logical item, such as medications list, encounter note etc.). The signature is created as a private-key encryption (e.g. RSA-1) of a hash (e.g. MD5) of a canonical representation (such as in schema-based XML) of the Version being committed. A likely candidate for defining the signature and digest strings in openEHR is the openPGP message format (IETF RFC24402), due to being an open specification and self-describing. The use of RFC2440 for the format does not imply the use of the PGP distributed certificate infrastructure, or indeed any certification infrastructure; openEHR is agnostic on this point. If no public key or equivalent infrastructure is available, the encryption step might be omitted, resulting in a digest only of the content. The signature is stored within the Version object, allowing it to be conveniently carried within EHR Extracts. The process is shown in FIGURE 22. |
