Is it possible to open an ssl mllp connection? One of our requirements is to have a secure connection between our organization and an outside 3rd party system.
Use VPN
:) ok, I take it as a NO that you can use mllp over ssl. We were noping this wasn't the case as we didn't want to set up vpn connections for all the parties we integrate with, but if that's what's required... Thanks. "dm" wrote in message news:%23SBuC3bIGHA.2320@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl... > Use VPN > >
Jeremy, I'm not sure I agree with the post entirely... The MLLP Protocol is a stream based protocol that doesn't know anything about the underlying connection, i.e. at the layer that SSL runs. Having said that, most SSL engines have the ability to tunnel a protocol over SSL without having to change the actual application and run the underlying system on SSL and have it pop out on BizTalk as a plain MLLP. Now, if you have a requirement for high performance/throughput or low latency then all kind of factors come into play and your mileage may vary. I recommend reading the documentation at http://www.stunnel.org/ and http://www.openssl.org/ They have great how to's etc and step by step guides, none of them specific to MLLP but MLLP is very simply and I bet the VNC sample will work just fine for you. You may ask yourself about using these two open source products to encrypt your HL7 data. This is certainly an discussion worth looking into, but I will say that openssl has been adopted for this in certain circumstances and at least one commercial product that is frequently used for encrypting medical information over FTP (S-FTP and FTPS) is under the covers using openssl as it's encryption engine. Anyway, you should check with our SSL Vendor and see if they have an equivalent to stunnel and if not then look into using the openssl with stunnel on the BizTalk side.
