[DGD] Re: Alternatives to the Kernel model of security...

[Noah Gibbs]

--- "Felix A. Croes" <felix at dworkin.nl> wrote:
> A Linux user who installs Phantasmal might not
> want to install davfs2,
> but he's not likely to have less than full
> access to the mudlib anyhow.
> Anyone else can use ftp or cadaver or whatever.

  Very true.  FTP is so far the best suggested
possibility since it allows users to edit (mostly)
directly, at least in some setups.  Really WebDAV has
the same property since I could just put up
instructions on the web page marked "advanced" or
something and let other people do it inconveniently. 
ScryMUD does that with it's Java client, and it works
well -- I was using an old machine with an old free
Java implementation, so it was effectively unusable,
but I just learned the command-line builder interface
and used telnet :-)

> It seems to me that your security system only needs
> a way to pick up
> new objects, which are always introduced from
> outside the mud by
> someone with full access.

  Assuming we don't export WebDAV or something to
builders/admins in some way, yes.  But then, anything
like that will work through DGD, so I guess it's a
solved problem in those cases anyway.

  You're right, the only real problem is object
introduced from outside the MUD by people with full
access.

> By the way, the kernel library already has a similar
> problem, since
> it keeps track of a file quota for each programmer.

  True.  You don't really care about external files
until they're accessed, but I guess that's true of me
too -- what you're really trying to prevent is having
an object with full permissions be compiled into an
object without being appropriately vetted, and allowed
only reasonable permissions.

  Which is fine, because you can require an object to
be introduced in some way to your MUDLib before you
agree to compile it.


=====
------
noah_gibbs at yahoo.com

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