B Secure Transport Connection Profiles (Normative)

B.1 The Basic TLS Secure Transport Connection Profile

An implementation that supports the Basic TLS Secure Transport Connection Profile shall utilize the framework and negotiation mechanism specified by the Transport Layer Security Version 1.0 protocol. Table B.1-1 specifies mechanisms that shall be supported if the corresponding features within TLS are supported by the Application Entity. The profile does not require the implementation to support all of the features (entity authentication, encryption, integrity checks) of TLS. Other mechanisms may also be used if agreed to by negotiation during establishment of the TLS channel.

Table B.1-1. Minimum Mechanisms for TLS Features

Supported TLS Feature

Minimum Mechanism

Entity Authentication

RSA based certificates

Exchange of Master Secrets

RSA

Data Integrity

SHA

Privacy

Triple DES EDE, CBC


IP ports on which an implementation accepts TLS connections, or the mechanism by which this port number is selected or configured, shall be specified in the Conformance Statement. This port shall be different from ports used for other types of transport connections (secure or unsecure).

Note

It is strongly recommended that systems supporting the Basic TLS Secure Transport Connection Profile use as their port the registered port number "2762 dicom-tls" for the DICOM Upper Layer Protocol on TLS: (decimal).

The Conformance Statement shall also indicate what mechanisms the implementation supports for Key Management.

The profile does not specify how a TLS Secure Transport Connection is established, or the significance of any certificates exchanged during peer entity authentication. These issues are left up to the Application Entity, which presumably is following some site specified security policy. The identities of the certificate owners can by used by the application entity for audit log support, or to restrict access based on some external access rights control framework. Once the Application Entity has established a Secure Transport Connection, then an Upper Layer Association can use that secure channel.

Note

There may be an interaction between PDU size and TLS Record size that impacts efficiency of transport. The maximum allowed TLS record size is smaller than the maximum allowed PDU size.

When an integrity check fails, the connection shall be dropped per the TLS protocol, causing both the sender and the receiver to issue an A-P-ABORT indication to the upper layers with an implementation-specific provider reason. The provider reason used shall be documented in the conformance statement.

Note

An integrity check failure indicates that the security of the channel may have been compromised.