On Tue, Apr 18, 2000 at 01:14:42PM +0100, Ian Clarke wrote:
> If we do it like this, we would need to exercise *extreme* caution to
> ensure that we don't create a security hole through which people could
> shutdown Freenet nodes, or worse, crack machines running nodes.  It
> would probably need to have a password system (relying on IP addresses
> is no good as they can be faked), and that password would probably need
> to be encrypted using some kind of handshake mechanism.  This rapidly
> becomes very very complicated.
> 
> Much easier to just allow communication via STDIN and STDOUT.
> 
> Ian.

Normally I would agree with limiting Freenet to only essential (and very
secure features) But the ability to remotely shutdown / purge my Freenet
node just-in-case would be a nice addition for my peace of mind :-) I would
probably implement a watchdog feature on my box to trigger under certain
(tampering) conditions. While this purging is unlikely to prevent anyone from
pulling data off of my disk, if they are determined to get it, it could make
life a bit more difficult, especially if i store everything to another
encrypted (virtual) filesystem. (Linux has some nifty support for those)

I advocate using a signing of messages with some sort of public key, this 
would be much more difficult to crack then a password scheme, and probably
not too much more trouble to implement, since it looks like we will end up
with various types of signed messages anyway.

Another possibility, however, and one that would be even easier to implement,
would be your idea of STDIN/OUT only controls. (This just occured to me) The
user could then write a frontend of their own, using shell scripts or a custom
program (GUI / Network sockets / etc) to handle control. This solution should
make everyone happy, while keeping to the *nix-like ideal of simple flexible
parts that can be combined into something useful and new. I don't see why any
of the current proposals could be handled in this manner. And this, being my
current favorite thing to play with at the moment, would certainly be something
I could contribute some time to. (Although my lady love *might* have a little
something to say about that ;-) 

--Adam Lydick

-- 
Freenet -- Re-Wiring the Internet
http://freenet.sourceforge.net
My Node: tcp/rivendell.yi.org:19114

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