SAMP over HTTPS

[Mark Taylor]

Hi SAMP enthusiasts,

this is a short progress report on my investigations into getting
SAMP to work over HTTPS.  If you attended the Apps sessions in
Sydney, you may remember I concluded it was basically impossible;
fortunately there were some smarter people than me in the audience
and Tom Donaldson pointed out there is a way round the main problem
I saw: basically you can bounce all SAMP communications off some
remote server rather than having to manage (problematic) HTTPS
comms to the local host.

I've prototyped some ideas and I have some working code.
I made a presentation on this at the recent ASTERICS (Euro-VO)
meeting, slides available here:

   https://www.asterics2020.eu/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=open:wp4:wp4techforum2

My experimental code (still under development) and some other links 
are available on github:

   https://github.com/mbtaylor/tlsamp

I'm currently working with Tom McGlynn to see if he can get it
running at HEASARC.

I won't go into any more detail here.  There's still quite a bit of
work to do, including working out whether this is really worth all
the effort or not.  I will present something in Cape Town, but this
message is just a heads up in case anybody wants to follow progress 
or would otherwise like to get involved at this stage.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/