On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 12:49:21AM -0800, Jens Alfke wrote: > Essentially, you add a nested object to the JSON that contains the > signature data, the document digest, and the public key identifying the > signer. This is a direct translation from the original YAML of a schema I > designed & implemented a year ago for an application I was working on. > The underlying ideas come from the earlier "key-centric identity" systems > SDSI and SPKI. [...] > I don't think this would require any changes to CouchDB itself. But most > uses of it would require verifying signatures in document validation > functions; this requires doing some serious crypto (like RSA encoding), > and I don't know if there is any reliable and performant JavaScript > implementation of that.
This is an interesting idea, but surely document level signing is something that sits at the application level, not the database level. I'm not sure that I would replicate from an untrusted node, unless I was prepared to deal with the consequences. If I did want to make sure of the identity of the node I was replicating with I would either tunnel over a secure connection using hosts keys or proxy through an SSL gateway with server/client certificates and an ACL. -- Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater
