Magma Security (uid/pwd)

[Chris Muller]

Hi Udo, I don't know what your security requirements are, but

  - protection of sensitive information?
  - protection from modification of objects?

Given the end-to-end argument, these things can sometimes be handled
well in the domain level.  We did this for a commercial application
I'm using, serialzing and encrypting sensitive objects into the
persistent model.  That way, even if the disk-packs get stolen (often
we hear of "stolen laptops with personal information") is still
secure.

Unfortunately, Magma does not provide its own authentication
mechanism.  I attempted a super-secure version of Magma a couple of
years ago by way of integration of the KryptOn crypto facade.
Unfortunately, after a year of working on it I got side-tracked to do
the multi-attribute queries.  Before I could return to the security, I
went to C5 and got fairly demoralized from comments regarding the
difficulty of implementing security.  That, and other priorities put
the security seriously on the back burner.

BUT, the issue is not dead by any means.  The ultimate goal for Magma
is to be able to run naked on the Net.

Until then, there are some simple password things that could be done
to take Magma from "completely open" to at least an illusory level of
security.  But I'm not willing to put anything into the base that
won't be a complete, water-tight, solution.

  - Chris



On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Udo Schneider
<Udo.Schneider at homeaddress.de> wrote:
> Miguel Enrique Cobá Martínez schrieb:
>
> Thank for your help.
>
>> I think that Magma doesn't have this functionality (yet). But you could
>> work around the problem in the OS layer, that is, you can use a firewall
>> that filters IP for you. At least this would let you work until magma can
>> filter source IP from clients.
>
> That's what I'm doing right now. However we plan to seperate the seaside
> frontends from the magma backend(s). The current idea is to run the seaside
> frontends on dynamically allocated amazon EC2 instances - so we won't know
> the allowed IP. Maybe I have to patch our iptables script to include the EC2
> instance IP dynamically.
>
>> BTW, the IP can be faked, without your server noticing it. The right way
>>  to filter clients it is using client certificates.
>
> The word "security" seems to open a whole can of problems :-)
>
> Thanks.
>
> CU,
>
> Udo
>
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