From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2000-12-10T01:02:00+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:6970] Re: drb/druby docs in English?

"NAKAMURA, Hiroshi" <nahi@keynauts.com> wrote:
>
>Hi folks,
>
> > From: chad fowler [mailto:chadfowler@yahoo.com]
> > Sent: Saturday, December 09, 2000 11:22 AM
>
> > dRuby really has not much to do with SOAP.  dRuby is a
>
>Agreed.
>
>I who implemented SOAP4R and Seki-san who implemented DRb
>talked about co-working of SOAP and dRuby.  We thought below
>possibilities.
>
>- dRuby over SOAP
>- SOAP over dRuby
>- dRuby/SOAP bridge
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

>- SOAP as a RPC part of dRuby

The bridge is the only one that could make sense to me.

>These do not make sense to us now...  SOAP is independent
>from programing language.  dRuby is Ruby specific (so dRuby
>applications are Write Once, Run Anywhere where Ruby runs).
>They could kill characteristics each other.  Folks, how do
>you think?

I think that Bruce Schneier is absolutely correct that by
building an internet prototol with no security model which
is hard to filter, SOAP will be responsible for a new host
of security holes.

  http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0006.html#SOAP

I have not looked at druby.  However if you could internally
implement some of the ideas of a capability system, that
would be very, very good.  I first ran across these at
http://www.eros-os.org/, he has a nice introduction to the
ideas at http://www.eros-os.org/faq/basics.html.

Basically it works like this.  Access is provided through
objects.  You can only name resources through objects.  If
you can name a resource then you must have had permission
to access that.  If you cannot name it, then you have no
business knowing that it exists.

Contrast to the usual authentication based on (purported)
id.  On a Unix system if any program anywhere that runs as
root gets compromised, then the whole system is at the mercy
of the person who just broke in.  On a capability system
that program does not run "as" anyone, it just had the
necessary capabilities to do what it needed to do.  So the
compromise is limited in scope.

You will understand perfectly if you can think of this as
the fact that an access control system is using global data
and constant checking of "if" conditions to decide accesss
(from things like like the user identity of the process)
while a capability system encapsulates that idea into an
opaque data structure just like OO programming does.

> > bit more object oriented than SOAP.  It's probably
> > more akin to EJB in the Java world (or really
> > lightweight CORBA minus the language
> > interoperability?).
>
>Sure.  We can do much much thing with dRuby.  SOAP is only
>a simple, easy RPC (or messaging).
>
Make that a simple, *INSECURE*, easy RPC.
>
[...]
>// NaHi
>// Sorry for my poor English.

Sorry for not speaking Japanese!  (There is no need when
doing us a favour in speaking our language to be apologetic
for not being perfect!)

Cheers,
Ben
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