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HIPAARails

This gem is intended to be a rails plugin that can make HIPAA compliance for a Rails 3+ developer easy by allowing easy encryption of sensitive model attributes, as well as comprehensive audit/logging of these fields.

This is still a work in progress.

What it does

This gem allows users to encrypt/decrypt model attributes easily (with the help of the attr_encrypted gem) using a passphrase-based key that can optionally be stored remotely. In addition, it uses the paper_trail gem to audit accesses to model fields in a separate table

Dependencies

attr_encrypted: https://github.com/shuber/attr_encrypted

paper_trail: https://github.com/airblade/paper_trail

Usage

  1. Specify the hipaarails gem in your Rails Gemfile: gem 'hipaarails', :git => "git://github.com/oakenshield/hipaarails"
  2. bundle install. This should also pull the dependencies
  3. Copy config/initializers/hipaarails_passphrase.rb to config/initializers in the app
  4. Copy lib/hipaarails.yml to the config/ directory in the app
  5. In a model, specify the fields that must be encrypted. For example, if a User model has the following accessible attributes: attr_accessible :name, :email, :password, :password_confirmation It can have the email attribute transparently encrypted as follows: attr_encrypted :email, key: SampleApp::Application.config.hipaarails_passphrase, cipher: SampleApp::Application.config.hipaarails_cipher
  6. On rails server start, it will ask you for a passphrase that will be converted to the encryption/decryption key used to read/write to the DB. In dev. environment, this is a hardcoded key but it will ask you each time you boot the server in the prod environment.
  7. Heroku causes a bit of a problem because you cannot see the 'rails server' console. Instead, set the passphrase as a heroku config variable prior to git push like so: heroku config:add ENCRYPTION_PASSPHRASE=passphrase

TODO

  1. Implement migration generator to migrate an existing table with unencrypted fields to one with encrypted fields
  2. Figure out how to ask for passphrase on heroku rails server start
  3. Implement paper_trail integration for encrypted feature accesses/changes
  4. Integrate with key management server