On 2014-05-13 11:36, Counihan, Tom wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
>  
>
> Reading all the extensive traffic on the topic, I come away with a vision of 
> the Cynara scope.
>
> I would like to ask the question to get it validated.
>
>  
>
> Is Cynara’s exclusive goal to service ‘downloadable’ Web applications from an 
> ‘app store’?
>

Let me try to answer that question.
The main purpose for Cynara is to implement user space access control between 
downloadable applications and built-in services. We are considering both web 
applications and native applications (OSP, or potentially other native app 
framwork). There are also few other use cases that can be achieved
with little extra effort:
- provide policy for app-to-app communication, e.g. a notion of custom 
privileges provided by an application and used by another one. DataControl API 
in Tizen 2 was a thing that could benefit from such feature. But it never 
provided a proper policy support, there is only one coarse privilege
http://tizen.org/privilege/datacontrol.consumer.
- limit access of built-in, preinstalled applications. This would require 
running them with separate Smack labels. It would work for applications that 
are already implemented as clients of built-in services.


One common factor for all considered Cynara use cases is the User domain. It is 
supposed to enforce policy per user, per application and per privilege.

>  I’m inferring this from statements like
>
> “The application, we'll call it A, is downloaded and installed at the user's 
> request”
>
> “In my current understanding, Cynara is targeted at web apps which run inside 
> a controlled environment already (the web runtime) and can only access the 
> host through these services”
>
> “That's the whole reason that we need Cynara, so that the abstract 
> "privileges" these apps are required to be allowed can be managed.”
>
> “> I still wonder whether we can apply the same concepts and mechanisms
>
> > for app store apps also to system apps. Let's ignore that for now, though.
>
>  
>
> Of course we can. The biggest problem is that it would require changing 
> programs that we're getting from the community, and we don't generally want 
> to change them (for a number of reasons) if we can avoid it..”
>
>  
>
>  
>
> As you can see I am attempting to decipher conversation that leads me to a 
> perspective on what is in/out of Cynara scope in the absence of an explicit 
> statement describing this.
>
> What I am missing is an express statement as to what Cynara is focused on 
> servicing and what it is not.
>
>  
>
> I ventured over to Jira - https://bugs.tizen.org/jira/browse/PTF-198 - and 
> get this “Services that are being used by applications need to control if the 
> caller has sufficient privileges to call each API.”, which is reaffirmed in 
> the Cynara wiki. The terminology “application” in this context is
> ambiguous – it could mean exclusively downloadable we apps, or also 
> additionally mean what Patrick calls “System Apps”.
>
>  
>
> If I understand the Smack Three Domain model, it identifies a “User domain is 
> comprised of the services that interact directly with the person using the 
> Tizen system and the data those services maintain”.
>
> If I apply my understanding to the terminology on the Cynara thread, I could 
> infer that the project is exclusively focused on servicing Downloadable web 
> applications that use this user domain – correct?
>
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