[erlang-questions] Securing remote spawning

[Johan Montelius]

I've also been thinking about these issues: how to make use of Erlang distributed features but more adaptable than the all-or-nothing cookie. The lib_chan modules in Joe's book describe one way of implementing password protected access to server processes that are listening on specified ports. It would of course be nice to have similar functionality but in the Erlang machinery.

I'm thinking of a Erlang node that is open for remote messages but only from nodes that have been authenticated and authorized. Starting to think in these terms is of course opening a big box of questions: is authorization tied to a node or a process, can a process delegate rights, can a registered process send any pid in a reply message and can this pid be used even if that process has not been registered, what happens if we send functions in messages, will these functions have access to any module on the receiving side, can we provide a sand-box with limited computational resources, ... not to mention the different authorization schemes that one could use.

I'll hope to have more time to look at this so if anyone have ideas on what functionality is desired I'm interested.

  Johan




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KTH ICT
Johan Montelius