[libdb-develop] LibDB and Administrative Access

[Morbus I. <mo...@di...>]

I'm not a huge, huge fan of reinventing the wheel so, for the early
versions of LibDB, all administrative authentication will be handled
by the webserver itself. In other words: outta the box, anyone can
modify your LibDB database and it's up to you to secure it.

There are a few reasons for this:

 * I don't, currently, have the time to code a whole authentication
   layer, with user accounts, passwords, hashing, verification, blah
   blah blah. It's so much easier to let the webserver handle it.

 * I'm not a fan of cookies in my stuff. Cookies would be required if
   I were to do my own authentication; the only other alternatives would
   be un/pw in the URL (ahahaha), or some other cheap way of server
   side session management (flawed and exploitable).

 * Built-in security in a webserver is often far more
   secure than stuff people re-code in their scripts.

 * For demonstration purposes, I don't need to worry about wearisome
   instructions like "for the demo, enter 'this' as your username and
   'sucks' as your password".

 * Similarly, I don't have to worry about *implied* security. If I
   set a default username of "Admin" and a default password "Bob",
   I don't have to *trust* the user to change them. There's no grey
   area with webserver based security: you're either secured (on
   your own volition) or you're not (also on your volition).

With that in mind, an unsecured administrative script WILL spit
out errors: http://www.disobey.com/noos/LibDB/dev/admin.cgi. Of course,
the tip page it directs you too hasn't been written yet, but I'm
working on it! <g>

-- 
Morbus Iff ( i'd swear in japanese, but your email doesn't support UTF-8 )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
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