Disclaimer: It is Monday, I overslept and haven't had coffee yet. If I
sound
overly grupmy, that is the reason :)
On Jul 7, 2008, at 05:29, David Pitman wrote:
Just to let you know that I have been working on an "out-of-the-box
solution
for 1)" for a few weeks (in my spare time), mainly at this stage
mapping out
various schemes for how this could work and learning more about other
databases' authentication frameworks. I figure if it is conceptually
similar (as far as convenient) to existing authentication frameworks
such as
what's used by mySQL, then developers will have an even easier
learning
curve and find CouchDB yet more attractive.
Please do _NOT_ model a security model after the MySQL security model.
There are so many things wrong with it that I don't even know where to
begin. Well, maybe, it is not that bad, but it is not easy to use and as
a result everybody implements their own security custom scheme on top of
MySQL and as a result, shared hosters give out only single MySQL
accounts,
because that's what everybody needs and as a direct result you can't
share or
move a userbase between two applications because, well, they have their
own system. And as a bonus point: All security systems need to do the
same
thing over and over again and will introduce the same bugs over and
over again.
I don't want that happen to CouchDB :) It would be nice if CouchDB's
security
system would be exposed to a user & application for usage so they have a
framework to do logins and permissions that all CouchDB applications can
share. To avoid a) duplication of effort by writing yet another user
management
and permission system b) introduction of another two billion security
systems
that all have one bug or another and c) having to maintain two
separate for
two separate applications which is either a PITA for the user or admin.
Yes out of the box would be nice, yes LDAP and other backends should be
puginnable and yes this involves a lot of work and that's why we (at
least I)
want to keep that off 1.0.
At the moment I'm prototyping in php and c++ (fast and easy), but
once I've
established how I want it to work, I'm planning to start working
with Erlang
(I'm new to that). I'll post up some details of my ideas once I've
got a
nice fleshed-out concept that seems to work for me nicely.
I'm thinking of a kind of "out-of-the-box" plugin to the CouchDB
which adds
in the authentication layer, but which is not required by CouchDB to
work.
Will let people know more when I've got something useful to show for
my
efforts ...
Ignoring the above: It would be really nice to see what you come up
with here,
please share your results :)
Cheers
Jan
--
Thanks.
David.
On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 6:47 PM, Jan Lehnardt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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
--
--
David Pitman
www.davidpitman.name
