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Re: Kerberos authentication for X-Mosaic 2.4 and NCSA HTTPD
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| From: <hallam@dxal18.cern.ch>
| Date: Friday, August 12, 1994 12:21PM
|
| The idea is to modularise the library so that a person with a proverbial
| good idea can easily fing a hook to fasten it to - in any area. So a person
| with a new transformer - encryption, compression, image handling, formatting,
| etc can just call a routine to slot something in.
|
I would strongly suggest taking this so far as to allow multiple
pluggable security providers using Dynamic Link Libraries. Virtually
every platform of interest supports some form of DLLs. This would
allow a corporation to customize for their particular authentication
scheme or allow RSA to provide a commercial encryption algorithm
without having to munge the sources and compile (which I suspect is
beyond the capabilities of many potential customers) or better yet, if
the security provider standard is done right and is well written, plug
into any commercial Web viewer. This also allows wide adoption of
trade secret sensitive algorithms without having to give out the source code.
In my mind, this is definately the direction the Web should head to
guarantee its longevity.
Modularizing the library is the first step. Using DLLs is the second
and the last step is allowing for multiple providers.
Does CERN have anything written up on the proposed library interface?
I haven't had a chance to peruse SHEN yet....
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