Spine Security Proxy (SSP)

The SSP is a forward HTTP proxy which will be used as a front end to control and protect access to GP principal IT systems that will be exposing FHIR based RESTful APIs as defined by the GP Connect programme. It provides a single security point for both authentication and authorisation for consuming systems. Additional responsibilities include auditing of all requests, throttling of requests and transaction logging for performance and commercial remuneration purposes.

Proxied FHIR requests

For First of Type (FoT) implementations FHIR endpoint location will be performed internally by the consumer system utilising the patient’s GP organisational identifier (for example, ODSCode as returned from a separate PDS lookup process) with the provider’s server endpoint being resolved via Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) queries to the Spine Director Service (SDS).

Once the provider server’s endpoint is determined using the SDS, an HTTP request to the proxy server will be constructed as follows:

GET https:/[proxy_server]/https://[provider_server]/[fhir_base]/[fhir_request]

A numder of Spine specific HTTP headers also need to be populated with the intended Spine interactionID and system ASIDs.

Please refer to the Spine Security Proxy Implementation Guide for full technical details.

Furthermore, the consumer’s client certificate is validated to ensure it includes valid certificate CN and DN details and that the certificate has not been added to the certificate revocation list (CRL).