Providing secure remote access to legacy applications

While the widespread adoption of Internet and Intranet technology has been one of the exciting developments of recent years, many hospitals are finding that their data and legacy applications do not naturally fit into the new methods of dissemination. Existing applications often rely on isolation or trusted networks for their access control or security, whereas untrusted wide area networks pay little attention to the authenticity, integrity or confidentiality of the data they transport. Many hospitals do not have the resources to develop new ''network-ready'' versions of existing centralised applications. In this paper, we examine the issues that must be considered when providing network access to an existing health care application, and we describe how we have implemented the proposed solution in one healthcare application namely the diabetic register at Hope Hospital. We describe the architecture that allows remote access to the legacy application, providing it with encrypted communications and strongly authenticated access control but without requiring any modifications to the underlying application. As well as comparing alternative ways of implementing such a system, we also consider issues relating to usability and manageability, such as password management

The United Kingdom and the negotiation of the 1969 New York Convention on Special Missions

During 1968-69, members of the United Nations, meeting in the Legal Committee of the General Assembly, negotiated a Convention on Special Missions, sometimes known as the New York Convention, setting out the privileges and immunities of ad hoc embassies between states. The negotiation was part of a process through which the UN sought to clarify the status and rights of official representatives, so that diplomacy could function with security and certainty. This article looks at the role of one leading power, the United Kingdom, in the talks. It explores how British interests were defined, the tactics used to secure them and how London came to terms with pressure from other states to redefine its approach. The focus is on the overall political thrust of the British negotiating position, as formulated mainly by the Foreign Office, rather than the detailed talks on such thorny issues as tax avoidance and diplomatic property. The articles shows that, while London was keen to see a codification of diplomatic law, Cold War considerations made it less than enthusiastic about an upsurge in the number of special missions that the New York Convention might encourage

Paper Session I-A - Evaluation of Space Shuttle and Orbiter Capabilities

About 13 years ago, we launched the Space Shuttle. As launch vehicles go, its performance has been incredible. Its launch reliability (66 of 67) is 98.5%. To support Space Station Assembly and Operations, we must increase Space Shuttle launch performance by adding over 13,000 additional pounds of payload to the 51.6-degiee inclination orbit This will allow us to haul payloads of over 40,000 pounds to support Space Station Assembly missions at altitudes up to 220 Bautica! miles. Potential weightto- orbit improvements are many. Every pouBd possible is being investigated. For example, we are building a new Aluminum Lithium External Tank to gain about 7,500 pounds of payload to oibit Seven new ascent trajectory design and steering software upgrades will gain us almost 1,600 pounds of payload to orbit We inteBd to use actual crew weights as the crew person is speced at 200 pounds. Many of you know about the Space Shuttle and what makes it operate. It is people. This paper is about what people in space have done to provide the United States and our international partners with unique operational capability to do what no other spacefaring Nation can do. The Space Shuttle and its trained, capable flightcrews are a great combination for expanding the human space exploration envelope

‘States not Governments’: Reforming Britain’s Practice on Diplomatic Recognition, 1973-1980

The subject of recognition is basic to the way in which relations are conducted between states: they cannot easily communicate if they do not recognize one another’s existence. The question is also a difficult one in international law because, in practice, governments often adopt a pragmatic approach when specific instances of recognition arise. One important difference in practice was between countries — including Britain until 1980 — that extended recognition to particular governments and those that focused simply on the recognition of states. However, in April 1980, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, announced a change in practice, so that London would ‘recognize States in accordance with common international doctrine’. This announcement followed years of discussion within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a discussion that was influenced by complex legal considerations over recognition and by membership of the European Community. This article investigates how and why such a change in British practice on recognition came about, showing that the British also gave consideration to a compromise solution, which would have involved tacit recognition of new governments, short of dispensing with such recognition altogether

Emotions and the British government’s decision for war in 1914

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest among international historians in the impact of emotions on foreign policy decisions, as part of a broader movement usually known as the ‘emotional turn.’ This is associated with findings, from the field of neuroscience, that cognition and emotion – rather than operating independently – are inextricably bound together in human decision-making Most work thus far has concentrated on American foreign policy since 1945, but this article broadens the focus to consider the impact of emotions on British decision-makers, especially Cabinet ministers, as they debated whether to go to war in 1914. It shows that, despite a tendency by the protagonists themselves to interpret their actions in rational terms, sufficient evidence of emotions can be found in the written record to allow a fresh approach to be taken to the July Crisis. While emotions must be seen as acting alongside rational mental processes, rather than regularly overpowering them, a focus on the subject helps explain different approaches taken by individual ministers, why the majority came to approve intervention in the conflict and how the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, partly by appearing to control his feelings, minimised resignations over the fateful decision. It also allows a new view to be taken of why the Cabinet decided to go to war on 4 August in defence of Belgium, despite deciding just a few days earlier that the question of fulfilling the 1839 guarantee of Belgian neutrality was ‘one of policy than of legal obligation.

Initial Experiences of Building Secure Access to Patient Confidential Data via the Internet

A project to enable health care professionals (GPs, practice nurses and diabetes nurse specialists) to access, via the Internet, confidential patient data held on a secondary care (hospital) diabetes information system, has been implemented. We describe the application that we chose to distribute (a diabetes register); the security mechanisms we used to protect the data (a public key infrastructure with strong encryption and digitally signed messages, plus a firewall); the reasons for the implementation decisions we made; the validation testing that we performed and the preliminary results of the pilot implementation

Coping with Poorly Understood Domains: the Example of Internet Trust

The notion of trust, as required for secure operations over the Internet, is important for ascertaining the source of received messages. How can we measure the degree of trust in authenticating the source? Knowledge in the domain is not established, so knowledge engineering becomes knowledge generation rather than mere acquisition. Special techniques are required, and special features of KBS software become more important than in conventional domains. This paper generalizes from experience with Internet trust to discuss some techniques and software features that are important for poorly understood domains

Multidisciplinary analysis of actively controlled large flexible spacecraft

The control of Flexible Structures (COFS) program has supported the development of an analysis capability at the Langley Research Center called the Integrated Multidisciplinary Analysis Tool (IMAT) which provides an efficient data storage and transfer capability among commercial computer codes to aid in the dynamic analysis of actively controlled structures. IMAT is a system of computer programs which transfers Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) configurations, structural finite element models, material property and stress information, structural and rigid-body dynamic model information, and linear system matrices for control law formulation among various commercial applications programs through a common database. Although general in its formulation, IMAT was developed specifically to aid in the evaluation of the structures. A description of the IMAT system and results of an application of the system are given