Re: SecurityManager

Surendra Lingareddy wrote:
> Thanks Greg. Security is quite critical and thus we went the SSL and
> Certs route. 
> 
> For now, I do have a SecurityManager(SM) in place with a policyfile that
> sets the flag to 'AllPermissions'. That seems equally bad and mucking
> with it seems to create more problems. My team tried a few controlled
> edits of the policyfile to provide disk r/w/ex access but clients do not
> seem to make a successful connection to the server when we restrict
> certain IP and port access.
> 
> I understand that a SecurityManager is needed when you build a generic
> service. SM checks and provides the stubs to the clients at run-time.
> But, if you do distribute the stubs as compiled classes, and if the only
> way a client can connect to the server is via SSL, then I fail to see
> the advantage SM brings into the picture.
> 
> I would rather not provide one at all than having a policyfile that
> allows 'allpermissions'.

The predominate issue that I always encounter is the "hidden" security checks 
that are not visible.  Things like property value checks etc. can really be 
frustrating to work through.  I don't recall whether it's still visible 
somewhere or not, but the guys at Sun, on the Jini team, had a SecurityManager 
that you could install, which would accumulate all the permission checks made, 
and then dump them out so that you could run an application and get a "default" 
policy file pretty easily.  I don't know if that's still around or not.  Perhaps 
Peter knows?

Gregg Wonderly

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