W3C

– DRAFT –
FHIR RDF

31 March 2022

Attendees

Present
Brad Simons, Dagmar, David Booth, EricP, Gaurav Vaidya, Gopi, Jim Balhoff, Matt Ward
Regrets
-
Chair
David Booth
Scribe
dbooth

Meeting minutes

RDF Lists

jim: A little bit stuck. Need to step through it carefully. If you put an RDF list into file and use the same nodes in axiom annotation, something gets confused in the OWL API algorithm. Annotations in the list get transferred into another axiom entirely.

jim: We want to treat the list as obj property assertions. It causes a problem if you try to put annotations on them.

Concept IRIs

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sW3Tgj2J_wBzlUWih07e0Vf_M9Ue8YyPqjK0arhajS8/edit#

david: How do we want these things to be transformed?

stemIRI = http://example.org/
code = "foo/bar"  --> http://example.org/foo/bar ?  http://example.org/foo%2fbar ?
code = "frib#jam"  --> http://example.org/frib#jam ? http://example.org/frib%23jam ?

eric: People might want to make their codes hierarchical.

gaurav: What if someone puts a "../.." in their code?

eric: What's the attack? In FHIR it's just a string. When it's interpreted in RDF, it becomes a type arc that goes outside of where they thought.

gaurav: What if you access a FHIR server, and supply a dodgy code. Nothing bad happens until a server tries to dereference the IRI.

dbooth: What if instead of accessing blood pressure with code "bp", a code "../../../patientName" is supplied?

eric: But the hacker could have crafted that URI anyway.

dbooth: but it could have been an internal IRI that is not shown to the user, that controls access.

gaurav: A current FHIR system would have a problem. We're considering a future scenario.

gaurav: Concept IRIs are sometimes useful to dereference.
… But that always opens a security issue.
… "Tell me everything about http://...../../../alice"

dbooth: Confused deputy attack?

eric: Could I trick the system into thinking a LOINC code is actually a SNOMED code?
… Or changing a prescription from aspirin to fentanyl?

eric: I don't think it makes the attack vectors worse.

dbooth: Principle of least surpise?

gaurav: I don't expect codes to be percent-encoded.

gaurav: FHIR doesn't use IRIs at all. Should we simplify to limit to URIs?

dbooth: Homework to please put in more examples to the document

ADJOURNED

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 185 (Thu Dec 2 18:51:55 2021 UTC).

Diagnostics

Succeeded: s/Instead/What if instead/

No scribenick or scribe found. Guessed: dbooth

Maybe present: david, dbooth, eric, gaurav, jim