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Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] proposal: active eclipse installation count service


On 2013-09-05 1:22 AM, Ed Willink wrote:
Hi

Nice idea, but isn't the extension point a perfect target for hostile
attacks?

I am not a security expert, but I think active eclipse installation
count report will be very low on your priority list if an attacker was
able to penetrate your system defenses and changes hostfile. He's
already got root on your system and can report anything you do
regardless of what eclipse can or cannot do.

I think man-in-the-middle is more plausible attack here, so we can
harden implementation and use SSL with hostname validation for example.


I'm pretty sure that I will disable it as vigorously as possible on my
installations.

I understand different users have different tolerance to data collection
and this is why I propose to move this functionality to a separate
plugin, which provides central place to disable it. You will also able
to completely remove the plugin, if you want to be absolutely sure
installation count is never reported. (and you probably want to stop
using p2 because it always reports installation stats).

--
Regards,
Igor


     Regards

         Ed Willink

On 05/09/2013 01:14, Igor Fedorenko wrote:
As you may or may not know, p2 can be configured to report feature or
plugin "download stats" to a remote server [1]. As a side note, this
reporting is done silently, i.e., without telling the user, and both
installations from remote servers and local filesystem are reported.

I would like to propose extending this functionality and in addition to
initial plugin/feature installation count, provide a way to count active
plugin installations on ongoing basis.

Here is what I have in mind

* All installation counting functionality will be moved to a separate
plugin, possibly outside of p2.
* There will be workspace preference to enable the counting, it will be
on by default.
* When the plugin first starts, it will inform the user about the
counting via a popup dialog or some other UI means and the user will
have a choice to either acknowledge the counting or navigate to
corresponding preferences page and disable counting there.
* The plugin will introduce new extension point that will allow bundles
express their desired to report active installation count. I don't have
exact details of the extension point yet, but I thin it should be
similar to existing p2.statsURI/download.stats p2 configuration
properties.
* Active installation count will be reported weekly and will only
include information about bundles that have the extension point and were
active since last report (hence "active installation count").
* On server-side, active installation count will use existing
http://download.eclipse.org/stats/ infrastructure, but we'll probably
recommend using different URLs for downloads and active installation
stats.

I also volunteer to implement this, provided there are no objections to
the proposed approach from Eclipse Foundation and somebody from platform
committers agrees to help me review and merge the changes.

For the reference, I've opened bugzilla enhancement [2] request
yesterday.

What do you think?

[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Project_Download_Stats
[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=416456

--
Regards,
Igor
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