Re: Authentication/Authorization Revisted

Samuel M. Smith wrote:

> It also allows for temporary elevation of permissions without having
> every act be at the higher permissions level. This approach is used in
> Mac OSX so that one rarely ever needs to be logged in as root. In
> Prothon one could write stuff so that it by default had a low level of
> permissions but for select cases could gain higher level access but
> would require authentication on an access policy basis.
> Access policy would be one of  (first access in a session, first
> access in a time period, every access)

I wasn't ignoring you, I was hoping someone who understood the issues you
were bringing up would respond.

Prothon security has no concept of being logged in or access policies.  It
is not an OS.  It's security system is there to allow code that is running
at one security level to control code running at a lower security level.
There is nothing that says how code gets to run at the higher level in the
first place.  This is true of language-level security (like that found in
Java) in general.

One can write applications in Prothon that do things like logging in,
creating users and user permission levels etc.  These applications would be
concerned with the types of issues you are bringing up.  I don't see how
Prothon can deal with such issues directly by itself.

.I have hard-wired some security levels into the basic interpreter and set
some access levels.  This is somewhat useful in that a typical Prothon
script cannot say things like Object = 0 and blow away the root object that
holds all the built-in methods.

To use all the features of the security system, some OS or monitor program
needs to be written for the environment it is to be used in.  A classic
example is on a website where you don't want visitors to crash your system
but you want to let them run Prothon code on your server.  I have promised
to try this as a test for the security system and let people try to hack
Prothon form over the web.  I need to find the time to write the web access
monitor code though.