At 01:53 PM 6/7/99 -0400, you wrote:
>The problem is the one way sync with the user. How do I have the admin make
>an update and have the user know about it,
>but not have the user's entries change the MAIN ADDRESS BOOK.
Flag the additions made by the admin
if (UsedByAdmin())
{
entry.flags |= ADMIN_RECORD;
}
This means that you have to let the device know that it's being used by an
admin (Menu option - enter admin password?)
If you want to avoid malicious users hacking your db records, you're going
to have to encrypt or sign them. Look for something like MD5 - a digest
algorithm and something to encrypt the digest - you really want to use
public key encryption, but thats a bit heavy for the Palm (supposedly
eliptic curve isn't, but who knows), so you might want to look for the
source to DES (not too hard to find, it's been around for donkeys years).
This does mean that you have to keep your server secure as you'd be storing
lots of fun passwords on it. (Well, you could use the same scheme as UNIX,
use the "password" entered as the key to encrypt a known phrase & compare
the result to a pre-generated on on the server, no stored passwords, but
you're still prone to dictionary attacks)
Another way to do it would be to just give admin people different .PRCs,
but that would be lame.
