Apps Messaging: security

[Mark Taylor]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, John Taylor wrote:

>> It is probably wise to make that information available, for instance
>> there may be messages which pass around the public IDs of an application
>> which originated a data object, and the originating application might
>> need to identify itself in this context.  In which case it looks like
>>
>>   (secret-id,public-id) = register*(hub-secret)
>> 
>
> Yes, that's probably better than providing a
>
> public-id=getPublicId(secret-id)
>
> which would be vulnerable to brute force.  Alternatively, we could define the

actually that would be OK, and maybe tidier - we're vulnerable to 
brute force in any case (app.exec(secret-id,args="rm -r .")). 
We can just recommend that secret-ids ought to be hard to guess.

> public id of an app to be a digest of the private id.  Too complicated?

neat, but would require access to MD5 libraries or whatever in application
code which is undesirable.


-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/