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Client to the ehealth infrastructure should implement an OpenID Connect "code flow" in order to login and get a set of tokens. 

Clients must be created in the login server and assigned a name, and the URL's used to redirect back to the client must be whitelisted.

Clients can be either confidential (like a server application) or public (like an app or a web application). Confidential clients authenticate themselves with a password. Public client must use PKCE (pronounced "pixi"). Explanations can be found many places, for instance here and here.

The loginserver of the infrastructure will delegate parts of the login to other servers, but that is transparent for the client (provided the login is handled by a generic browser window that can handle redirects).

Employee logins

For employees it is expected that the total login flow will look somewhat like this. Details can vary depending on the organization of the user (region, municipality or service/support/logistics organization).


Citizen logins (first time)

For citizens, a similar login flow could look like this:


Authorization Server

Unfortunately we don't have the right DNS names for the environments just yet.

But for now an Authorization Server for the inttest environment is available. Its endpoints is described in the contents of this URL: http://inttest.ehealth.sundhed.dk/auth/realms/inttest/.well-known/openid-configuration

Example authentication

Here is an example URL for an authentication request using HTTP GET, written in a readable format. It should be sent as a single line without spaces or newlines.

Authentication request
 http://inttest.ehealth.sundhed.dk/auth/realms/inttest/protocol/openid-connect/auth?
  response_type=code&
  client_id=<client_id>&
  redirect_uri=<redirect_uri>&
  scope=openid+profile&
  state=<state>&
  nonce=<nonce>&
  code_challenge=<challenge>&
  code_challenge_method=S256

The parameters have the following meaning:

  • response_type=code – indicates that your server expects to receive an authorization code
  • client_id= – A client ID that is registered on the Authorization Server
  • redirect_uri= – Indicates the URL to return the user to after authorization is complete, such as org.example.app://redirect or a tradition URL for a webapp https://app.example.org/redirect.
  • state=1234zyx – A random string generated by your application, which you’ll verify later
  • code_challenge=XXXXXXXXX – The code challenge generated as previously described
  • code_challenge_method=S256 – either plain or S256, depending on whether the challenge is the plain verifier string or the SHA256 hash of the string. If this parameter is omitted, the server will assume plain.

When the authentication is complete, the browser is redirected back to the given "redirect_uri" (which must be whitelisted in the Authorization Server) including a "code" as a request parameter. This code must be used when calling the token endpoint afterwards.

Here is an example of the following POST request to the token-endpoint.

Authorization code exchange
POST /auth/realms/inttest/protocol/openid-connect/token HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

  grant_type=authorization_code&
  code=<code>&
  redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fapp.mysite.org%2Fredirect&
  client_id=<client_id>&
  code_verifier=<secret>

NOTE: For native apps the "redirect_uri" will be a URI with a custom scheme registered to the app on the device, for example "org.example.app://redirect/".


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