Georgia Tech researcher flags flaw in open-source vets health system

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/120413-open-source-georgia-tech-276573.html

By Jon Gold
Network World
December 04, 2013

An academic exercise by a security researcher blossomed into a live-fire 
infosec emergency last month, after a major vulnerability was found in a 
central U.S. government healthcare database system.

Georgia Tech graduate student Doug Mackey didn’t set out to fix a 
potentially disastrous issue in a major government healthcare records 
system -- originally, he’d simply meant to outline the relative 
vulnerability of large government computer systems in general to attacks 
by foreign governments, as a final project for a Master's in Information 
Security degree.

He settled on the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology 
Architecture, or VistA, an open-source framework used by the Department of 
Veterans Affairs as a test case. The VA says it's the single largest 
integrated healthcare system in the U.S., serving 6 million patients per 
year.

“As much as possible for an independent researcher I wanted to study the 
security of software used within a real system in a critical economic 
sector,” he says. “The Health sector and VistA were chosen because VistA 
is open source and all the source code is easily available. Using the open 
source code I set-up an isolated lab test system to study.”

Mackey's code review found an alarming vulnerability in VistA that could 
have been used to execute “thousands” of remote commands, without any 
authorization, on these health records databases. But at first, he had 
trouble sounding the alarm.

[...]

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