Re: [Exist-development] Confused about permissions and defaults for XQuery files

[Chris T. <chr...@gm...>]

Wolfgang,

I haven't yet heard the security issue with the per collection defaults which you seem to be also liking at this point.

As a long time user and sometimes small contributor to eXist I am rather concerned with the burgeoning security apparatus. I was not concerned with it as long as it didn't get in the way. However, we now have an issue that is going to require me to do some quick engineering. We've been constructing a new version of our DB with the trunk because it has some features like the versioning and triggers which have been working for us and is otherwise satisfactorily stable. I have been assuming that I just didn't have things set correctly for the permissions default and got around today to trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.

I agree that an understandable (and preferably simple) approach to permissions is likely to be secure in that it is more likely to be understandable in terms of how to configure things to get the desired effects. being able to set the defaults on a top-level collection and have that inherited as with triggers seems simple and understandable in terms of permissions behavior.

In our case we have a tightly controlled access to the DB and can apply relatively simple security. The larger models involving LDAP and so on are fine for some situations but lets not lose sight of simple uses of eXist that are still serious production uses.

Chris

On Oct 18, 2011, at 5:09 PM, Wolfgang Meier wrote:

> 
> > Somehow, the old mechanism of defining default permissions on a collection basis was more consistent and thus, one could argue: more secure.
> 
> For example, with respect to the package repository, I could define the correct default permissions in two collection.xconf, one for the top collection, and one for the collection containing the XQuery modules. This way, the installer would not have to bother with setting permissions and the setup would be easy to understand and change for the package developer.
> 
> Wolfgang
>