On Aug 6, 2009, at 12:13 PM, erik quanstrom wrote:
poorly. massive, overengineered, and yet lacking:
http://lwn.net/Articles/344117
Ugh.
A brief apology on their behalf, though. I have been trying to
understand the workings of factotum, secstore, auth/keyfs and whatnot
for a while and I'm just now starting to get the feeling that I might
have a grasp on how all these things work together in concert to do
their jobs.
There is a propensity to develop software starting from the interface
working backwards to the functionality. When enough people reduplicate
a functionality, they decide to move the functionality out. This is
what you're going to get when you evolve software rather than
architect it. One of the things I have been impressed with in Plan 9
is that generally each layer of abstraction is comprehensive. On Linux
there is a tendency to have to keep adding more layers upon the
layers. This security framework, for example, relies on D-Bus for
communication. The appearance of hal, the "hardware abstraction layer"
a few years ago struck me too. Isn't that what the OS is supposed to
provide? Maybe it would have been feasible to add whatever it adds if
more of the drivers were in user space rather than kernel space.
It's easy for me to object to what they're coming up with but it would
be hard for me to describe in detail how exactly factotum + all the
other stuff encompass it, and I don't think that the paper we have on
factotum or the section in nemo's book are sufficient either. As a
devil's advocate, in my Mac keychain I have 13 keys related to file
shares and 22 WEP keys. I have my SSH key on 24 machines. Then I have
270 web form passwords or internet passwords in my keychain. Does
factotum handle web passwords? I'm presuming not but I don't really
know because I generally surf with Safari or Firefox outside Plan 9.
I'm not complaining about the browser situation, I'm just saying, it
seems to me that the average user probably has more website usernames
and passwords than everything else combined. That's certainly the case
with me. Could factotum be adapt to integrate with a browser and store
web form secrets? If so that would be a compelling objection, since it
looks like Firefox isn't going to start using their security framework
anytime soon. And who can blame them? It already has a ton of
dependencies and porting issues and this can only exacerbate it.
It might raise our profile a bit if someone who has a comprehensive
understanding of the security framework in Plan 9 would write a
rebuttal to this announcement, something along the lines of "Plan 9:
An Integrated Approach to Grid Computing" by Andrey Mirtchovski, Rob
Simmonds and Ron Minnich. That paper works largely as a refutation of
the complexity of the Globus Toolkit. It would also be helpful to
people like myself who are recent adopters of Plan 9 and don't have a
comprehensive understanding of the security architecture—perhaps
because we've been poisoned by systems like Mac OS X Keychain and SSH.
—
Daniel Lyons
