| Re: [stellation-res] why doesn't stellationd require a "password" argument? |
On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 09:19:41AM -0400, Mark C. Chu-Carroll wrote: > We already have a pretty decent authentication framework. I'd be > willing to support changes to the auth layer if they had a real > benefit. But I'm not willing to switch just for the sake of switching. > > Our current authentication system supports pluggable authentication > modules, challenge authentications, etc. It's really pretty decent. > > The main weakness of it, at the moment, is that we're not doing anything > clever to protect user passwords in the database - so protecting the > security of the database becomes important, and we're not doing a > great job of that yet. But that's not a huge deal to fix: the database > should be run in a protected mode, so that you need a password > to establish a database connection; the the password storage > should be changed to not use plaintext; and the encryption key > to decode the stored passwords should only be accessible > using an administators key. None of these are hard to do. > > Switching to JAAS might make sense, because it's a standard > mechanism. The benefits being that there might be more people understanding it and we get somebody else to review and maintain it for free. > If it could be done without adding a huge amount > of complexity to the system, I'd like to see it happen. As I see it now it will remove more code than it adds. For a small setup, sending passwords around is OK. If they want more security than that, they can set up kerberos and use its ticket-granting capabilities. > On the > other hand, adding another non-standard dependency to the system > for an auth layer is something that we'd need to carefully consider: > what benefits does Turbine have over what we're using? If they're > significant, and much easier than JAAS, then great. If not, then > then I'd rather not. florin -- "If it's not broken, let's fix it till it is." 41A9 2BDE 8E11 F1C5 87A6 03EE 34B3 E075 3B90 DFE4
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