On 11/19/2012 9:37 AM, Snowcrash Short wrote:
Well, it is only the single most popular opensimulator based grid you are writing complete off as hopelessly insecure, when the truth is that it can be hardened. Although I agree that complete security would require a rethink about where assets are stored.
As long as people can plugin simulators arbitrarily, these grids are impossible to secure. This is not up for interpretation. "Hardening," as you say, by providing session ids and checking permissions will only give a false sense of security, since when it comes to resources in this LL client, the simulators are proxies of user actions. Blocking the simulators would mean blocking the users.
Open, secure interoperation of grids, however, is perfectly possible. It can be done in different ways. One way is the Hypergrid. There are others.
The Hypergrid is designed with the separation of user services and simulator services in mind, similar to what you have described. It is possible to wrap up the collection of user services (inventory, assets, user accounts, avatar, and friends) and run them in isolation from grids (i.e. collections of one or more simulators under one authority). This is already possible now. You simply need to run a Robust server with exactly the Hypergrid services and no simulators.
In practice, people are still stuck with the grid model that encompasses both user and simulator services, so nobody operates on that separation [yet].
Your approach of having the user's computer as the locus of the user services is actually quite deficient, not the least of it the fact that people use different computers. There are very good reasons for why things are moving to the cloud in general. But I don't want to discourage you from exploring that approach, if that's what works for you. From everything you said, however, it seems that you are missing a few important bits related to security -- things that we have already thought through and addressed ("been there, done that"). What you want to do, the inventory download and upload, can be done in a way that doesn't upset anyone. Your approach is the wrong one because it upsets a lot of people. But again, if that's how you want to do it, go ahead and do it.
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