[Evergreen-general] Encrypted SIP2

[Lolis, John]

When we hosted our own Symphony ILS, I set up a free open source pfSense
firewall with an IPsec VPN tunnel for its traffic.  At the time, the
WorkFlows staff client only communicated via clear text, so the tunnel was
necessary for both normal ILS traffic as well as SIP2 traffic.

With Evergreen, the browser traffic is encrypted, so it's only for SIP2
traffic that a tunnel is needed now.  Unfortunately, our consortium doesn't
see it that way and is insisting that each member library have staff access
to the ILS through an encrypted tunnel as well--and each member library to
incur the cost for maintaining their respective tunnels.  Encryption upon
encryption.  Even Equinox, our ILS host, says that it's totally unnecessary.

John Lolis
Coordinator of Computer Systems

100 Martine Avenue
White Plains, NY  10601

tel: 1.914.422.1497
fax: 1.914.422.1452

https://whiteplainslibrary.org/

*When you think about it, *all* security is ultimately security by
ignorance.*



On Tue, 5 Jan 2021 at 09:43, Jason Boyer <jboyer at equinoxinitiative.org>
wrote:

> Hi Wendell, there isn’t really anything that can be done to SIP2 to make
> it secure without making it not-SIP2. That said, what can be done is to
> transfer it over an encrypted channel. I know some Evergreen and Koha
> systems handle SIP2 this way and I suspect TLC is doing the same. This
> tunneling can be done with stunnel (an openssl TLS tunnel) or ssh port
> redirection and most vendors are capable of dealing with one or the other.
>
> There’s nothing special needed in Evergreen to handle this; you just need
> to setup SIPServer to listen to a local IP rather than a public one and
> coordinate with the vendor what type of tunnel to use. I realize this is
> pretty non-specific but if you have any questions I or someone else on the
> list should be able to help out.
>
> Jason
>
> --
> Jason Boyer
> Senior System Administrator
> Equinox Open Library Initiative
> phone:  +1 (877) Open-ILS (673-6457)
> email:  JBoyer at EquinoxInitiative.org <JBoyer at EquinoxInitiative.org>
> web:  https://EquinoxInitiative.org/
>
> On Jan 5, 2021, at 9:05 AM, Gragg, Wendell E <WGragg at bryantx.gov> wrote:
>
> Hi all.  I haven’t posted in a while, but we are still in the process of
> evaluating ILS systems and our city IT department is balking at one thing,
> SIP2 being plain text.  Apparently, one vendor, TLC claims they have an
> encryption solution for SIP2, but I question whether it actually works or
> not, and TLC is another proprietary system, which we are trying to avoid.
>
> I have been trying to research SIP2 a bit more and am not finding a lot of
> information about security issues with it.  I’m also trying to find out if
> anyone in the Evergreen community has worked with encrypting SIP2 messages,
> at least sensitive information like passwords and user barcodes.
>
> Is this even possible in Evergreen and has it caused any problems with
> outside vendors like OCLC or Envisionware?
>
> I would like to find this out because I fear that our city IT is going to
> force us into an ILS we really don’t want.
>
> Thanks,
> Wendell
>
> Wendell Gragg, MSIS
> Automation Services Supervisor
> Bryan+College Station Public Library System
> Bryan, TX
> 979-209-5613
>
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