ACWP Chapter2 Intro
IHE White Paper on Access Control
Chapter 2: Introduction
Most of the fundamental concepts of access control have a history that reaches back to the 70s and 80s of the last century. This allows designers and developers of access control solutions for heathcare to build upon a settled base that is well understood with respect to its theoretical foundations and proven to be applicable through a huge number of running implementations.
The rather long history of these concepts does not mean that everything is said and done with respect to access control (e. g. loosely coupled security token services are a rather new paradigm that just makes its way into standards and running systems). But security is a severe issue with little room for experiments and therefore systems designers are always on the safe side by applying and evolving existing concepts rather than inventing new security mechanisms from scratch.