Rick Hillegas wrote:
So far there doesn't seem to be much controversy about installing a
security manager if the user forgets to. Please correct me if the
security-manager-installation is controversial too.
The controversy I'm aware of seems to be this: should we fail to boot
the server if authentication is turned off? There seem to be several
proposed solutions. All of these proposals install a security manager at
server-boot time if the user neglects to. All of these proposals also
provide a command line option which forces the server to boot even if
Derby thinks it's a bad idea:
1) Flunk the boot if authentication is turned off (current 10.3 behavior).
2) Flunk the boot only if authentication is turned off and the server is
listening on something other than localhost.
3) Don't flunk the boot.
There is a related issue of whether to print/log a diagnostic if the
server comes up in what it considers an unsafe configuration. I think
this can be addressed by DERBY-1056 later on.
I vote for option (3). It completely removes the incompatibility which
people are concerned about.
3) would make the current flag '-noSecurityManager' actually mean what
it says, always a good thing. Currently it actually means "no security
manager *and* ignore the fact no authentication is set up".
I'm torn between 2) and 3)
2) Seems a good compromise and corresponds to the unconfigured state.
3) My fear is that this is a big exposure to security issues with Derby,
however the user has made configuration changes and it is documented
that one should setup a security manager and authentication when making
such a change.
Another factor that could be brought in is if
derby.connection.requireAuthentication is set to *false*. This is an
explicit request to have no authentication, rather than a default. Thus
if the property was set to false then allow "no authentication" boots. I
don't think this will help backwards compatibility (unlikely to have the
property set to false) but it may allow existing users that want no
authentication to use 10.3 easily.
Dan.
