Securing health applications with CACert.org

Still trying to recover from the conference last weekend.

OpenEMR was out in force at the conference and we had some interesting discussions about the best way to make php applications more secure. The following code is in php but the theory applies to any electronic health record. The wonderful thing about this method is that Apache does all of the heavy lifting for you.

Of course, none of this works without an apache configuration!!

# another fine way to enforce https only.

        ServerName example.com:80
        AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml .php3
        DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/example/"

        
        #The following rewrite just forces everything to https!!!
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
        RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}
        




        ServerName example.com:443
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example

        # Standard stuff
        ErrorLog logs/ssl_error_log
        TransferLog logs/ssl_access_log
        LogLevel warn
        SSLEngine on
        SSLProtocol all -SSLv2
        SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT:!SSLv2:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW
        SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
        SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" \
                nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
                downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
        CustomLog logs/ssl_request_log \
                "%t %h %{SSL_PROTOCOL}x %{SSL_CIPHER}x \"%r\" %b"

	# end standard stuff

 
	# the certificate that CACert.org has signed...
        SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/example.com.crt
	# my super secret private key
        SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/example.com.key

	# not that I can use the directory command to protect a single file!!
        
                # requries a client certificate
                SSLVerifyClient require
                SSLVerifyDepth 2
                # in order to validate the client certificates I need to have 
                # a copy of the CAcert.org root certificate
                SSLCACertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/cacert.crt
                SSLOptions +StdEnvVars
        
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