Re: ClientAuthentication questions

Hi Gregg,

Gregg Wonderly wrote:

> I created a new BasicInvocationDispatcher and BasicInvocationHandler which
> passed down the "login" identity (an ssl endpoint makes sense in doing
> this).
> During each remote call, PAM login is invoked, and only successful logins
> proceed.  The associated Subject is activated to allow further control.

I can't recall all the details, but I believe the client subject (as per
Jini security) was also restored by the dispatcher as the subject
executing the remote method invocation, this is something that I don't
want to do.

>> [1] anyone felt the need to control access permissions on a more
>> granular level than what is currently available through
>> AccessPermission, if so please let it know.
>
> I still have some code that I've wanted to get out which takes a policy
> expressed by the description of each method and it's parameters.  Policy
> can be
> assigned based on the value of particular parameters.  In its current
> form, it
> uses ACLs and explicit policy checks in that regard.

With 'value' I guess you really mean value and not type. If so than this
is where I don't want to go now because for me it feels that access
control based on values as parts of remote method invocations is
something that I would consider application layer security and something
that seems to be very hard in a declarative way.

It is a pity that there is no standard (that I'm aware of) that allows
adding attributes to a X500Principal that could be stored as part of the
public certificate (or associated with it) and that could be utilized by
a framework or application for the purpose of access control checks. You
end up all the time inventing your own extensions for this :-(

> I'd like to recast this concept into a new set of tools which would read an
> interface, generate the XML text that my tools understand, and then
> rewrite the
> code generator to use Policy based control instead.

With Policy you mean security policy, in that case you likely end up
(again) with the inability to express "all trusted principals are
allowed to invoke this method".

Thanks for the feedback.
--
Mark

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