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i2b2-pm-cas

Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance (Georgia CTSA), Emory University, Atlanta, GA

What does it do?

This is a stock i2b2 1.7.12a project management (PM) cell, patched with support for delegating authentication to a server that implements version 2 of the CAS protocol for single sign-on.

The code is adapted from similar code for an older version of i2b2 by Dan Connolly found at https://bitbucket.org/DanC/i2b2-pm-cas.

Version history

Version 1.3

Updated i2b2 version to 1.7.12a.

Version 1.2

Updated i2b2 version to 1.7.09c.

Version 1.1

Updated i2b2 version to 1.7.08b.

Version 1.0

Initial release using i2b2 version 1.7.05.

CAS implementations supported

We expect any full implementation of version 2 of the CAS protocol to work. In particular, the implementation must support proxying. The following implementations of CAS are known to work:

Requirements

See the i2b2 installation guide for requirements. Our patches do not change them.

In order to login to i2b2 using CAS, you also need to install our patched i2b2 webclient, found at https://github.com/eurekaclinical/i2b2-webclient-cas.

Installation

Follow the usual i2b2 installation instructions, except replace the stock project management cell with this one before compiling i2b2.

Create a Java properties file, /etc/eureka/application.properties with one line:

cas.url = the URL of your cas server

Finally, you may need to install the SSL certificate served by CAS server into the certificate store of the Java installation that i2b2 is using. This is especially true if the CAS server's certificate is self-signed. See https://www.sslshopper.com/article-most-common-java-keytool-keystore-commands.html for instructions on how to work with the Java certificate store.

Configuration

When using these patches, the i2b2 project management module's user data table becomes an authorization table. The code authenticates the user with Eureka! CAS, and then it checks the user data table for the existence of the user's account before authorizing the user. Any passwords in the user data table are ignored.

When logging into i2b2 services by means other than the patched web client, this patched PM cell will authenticate the user with i2b2's built-in authentication mechanism, that is, by checking the username and password against what is stored in the PM_USER_DATA table in the project management cell's schema.

Security warning

If your users will only be logging into i2b2 through the patched web client, populate the password field in PM_USER_DATA with a randomly generated hashed password. Do not set the password field to NULL. Our limited testing suggests that leaving the password field set to NULL currently results in the user not being able to login to i2b2 through the built-in mechanism, but we are unaware of any guarantee that the behavior will stay that way.

Licensing

This code is released under the i2b2 Software License version 2.1, available at https://www.i2b2.org/software/i2b2_license.html.