On Jul 2, 2008, at 20:13, Robert Fischer wrote:
Two points.
1) I'd encourage the CouchDB group to stick to authorization and
leave authentication to proxies at
this point. If you have some free time in the future, maybe you can
think about integrating an
authentication layer -- but there's a lot more critical
functionality needed, and an HTTP proxy can
handle it just fine for the time being. If you consider that
username/password authentication is
inherently evil, and "real" authentication servers are built off of
LDAP, kerberos, or the like,
then the massive amount of work involved in doing authentication
should be clear. And this isn't
even getting into the likelihood that a new authentication
implementation will probably get some
stuff wrong in non-trivial, non-obvious ways. So, please, let
authentication be handled by proxies.
2) In terms of authorization, it would be nice if there was a
concept of "read only" and
"read-write" premissions at the database level. MySQL goes a bit
nuts with their permissions
possibly going all the way down to the column level, but it's nice
to have that distinction at the
database level. This means I can guaranty I don't accidentally
modify something when I just mean to
be querying it: this kind of functionality has saved my butt a
number of times in the past ("Why is
this update failing on my dev box? Oh...wait...that's my production
terminal window!"), and it
would be sad to see it left out.
+1 on both accounts.
For the long term, it'd be nice to have an out-of-the-box
solution for 1), but we shouldn't focus on this now.
Cheers
Jan
--
Of course, I could do that kind of permission setting at the Apache
level, too, by defining the
routes as locations and setting permissions -- but it'd probably be
both cleaner and more
appropriate to be done in the DB itself.
~~ Robert.
Noah Slater wrote:
Perhaps we could rely on standard HTTP auth either:
* as passed back through a proxy
* as negotiated by CouchDB using a similar method to Apache httpd
This doesn't seem too hard, Mochiweb might even support it natively.
On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 12:56:44PM -0400, Damien Katz wrote:
We need to implement a couchdb security model. I think at a high
level
it should be simple as possible. Also I think we won't do
authentication, that should be handled by a authenticating proxy, or
application code.
I'm thinking our model looks something like this:
We'll have server wide admin accounts, and dbadmin accounts. Db
Admins
can create dbs and admin their own dbs. Server admins are like
superusers. Only admins are allowed to update design documents in
databases.
The per-database customized module will be supported by custom
validation functions contained in databases design documents.
When a
document is updated, either via replication or new edit, these
validation functions are evaluate with provided context.
Here is a very simplistic validation routine:
function (doc, ctx) {
if (doc.type == "topic" && doc.subject == undefined) {
throw "Error, a subject is required for all topics.";
}
}
Something that looks at previous revisions:
function (doc, ctx) {
var prev = ctx.get_local_doc();
if (prev != null && prev.author != ctx.user_name()) {
throw "Error, update by non-author.";
}
}
It should also be possible modify the document while it's being
saved,
but this might only be allowable when its a new edit, vs a
replicated
update or backup restore.
All further security schemes would be handled the customized
functions,
and though APIs to do database or external ldap queries.
On Jul 2, 2008, at 3:08 AM, Jan Lehnardt wrote:
Hello everybody,
this thread is meant to collect missing work items (features and
bugs) for for our 1.0 release and a discussion about how to split
them up between 0.9 and 1.0.
Take it away: Damien.
Cheers
Jan
--
