[asterisk-dev] AstriDevCon - PineMango

[Tim Panton]

On 9 Oct 2008, at 22:27, Brian Degenhardt wrote:
> Snip......

>
> I'm not saying AAA shouldn't be done, just that we're not admitting
> defeat by punting it up to the orange stuff.  As I mentioned earlier,
> Switchvox has very fine-grained permissions, it's just implemented
> outside of Asterisk.  In the same way, most web frameworks use
> cookie-based authentication based on business rules, and forgo the  
> whole
> HTTP Basic/Digest Auth mechanisms altogether.
>
> cheers
> -bmd

As an ex-security person I know the value of ensuring that security
is built in to the design, not tacked in as an after thought.

However in this case I wasn't persuaded of the value of a generic
fine-grain object security model for asterisk.

I can think of a couple of places where this has been implemented
and _never_ used by developers:
Windows kernel - from NT onwards and the Java Security model.
What happens in both these cases is that the generic framework is
only ever used to implement a much simpler coarser security layer.
The Linux kernel takes the other approach, only building the required
coarser layer.

We should make sure we leave the possibility of a security layer, but
we should not specify it untill we have a much clearer picture of how  
the
API is used, and hence what the appropriate security model should be.

I want to thank everyone for taking part in (especially Brian for  
leading)
an amazingly productive couple of days at astridevcon on this topic.
Asterisk needs this API so that we can (for instance) offer
the same standard Frameworks that Cisco, Nortel and Avaya use
so that Asterisk can displace them in the telephony-app space.

All we need now is to turn the diagram into code ;-)

Tim.



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