[erlang-questions] Preventing calling some functions

[Zoltan Lajos Kis]

Hi,

It seems we were talking about different stories then :). I thought you 
meant a server that is to be run by anybody and third-party plugins that 
can be run along. For example Apache http server and the mod_rewrite 
"plugin".

Facebook is of course a completely different story. Here you are mixing 
your own code with others' code. I believe in this case the question of 
trust I raised quite applies. At least I suppose you have more 
confidence in your "Facebook" server than in the third party applications.

In such a case your best bet is to define a communication channel 
between your server and external applications, and have the apps run 
separated from your main server. For example I think you have to run 
your Facebook application on your own machine, while it can communicate 
with Facebook over HTTP only.

People experienced in the Java (EE?) way of doing this might have other 
ideas as well ...

Regards,
Zoltan.

Vasilij Savin wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Let's take a look at example. We have some server/application like 
> Facebook and allow third-party plugins. Would you allow all and 
> everybody to mess up with the core functionality that is there? I 
> would really not trust explicitly other programmers that much, because 
> even unintended mistake would crash the system probably and also it 
> allows 3rd party authors to take shortcuts and take shortcuts instead 
> of using suggested APIs.
>
> I do not think it is defensive programming, because it should be some 
> sort of built-in mechanism that prevents 'unauthorised' calls. Though 
> at this moment I do not think there is such thing, since the intent 
> during creation of Erlang was quite different.
>
> Regards,
> Vasilij Savin
>
>
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Jayson Vantuyl <kagato@REDACTED 
> <mailto:kagato@REDACTED>> wrote:
>
>     > Hi,
>     >
>     > I don't see why I should have more trust and confidence in the
>     creator of the server application itself then in the creator of a
>     plugin.
>     > If I want to restrict a plugin from doing something particular
>     on my machines, I would restrict the server itself in the first place.
>     I don't particularly buy this.  I think that there are plenty of
>     reasons to lock-down a plug-in that have nothing to do with
>     trusting the author or not.  If security is at all a concern, it's
>     perfectly reasonable to attempt to achieve a high-level of
>     compartmentalization between components.  The principle of least
>     privilege is a good one, even within an application.  The plug-in
>     author doesn't have to be malicious for her code to be abused.
>
>     > Your second point sounds like "defensive programming". See:
>     http://www.ercore team can get stuck maintaining old APIs because
>     third-party lang.se/doc/programming_rules.shtml#HDR11
>     <http://www.erlang.se/doc/programming_rules.shtml#HDR11>
>     I heartily agree on this point.
>
>
>     --
>     Jayson Vantuyl
>     kagato@REDACTED <mailto:kagato@REDACTED>
>
>
>
>
>
>