[erlang-questions] Two beautiful programs - or web programming made easy

[Joe Armstrong]

Re security.

It seems to me you can either secure the pipe (ssh) or secure the things in
the
pipe (ie the content).

I'd prefer to secure the content since I can do this with my own code - rsa
in erlang
boils down to A^C mod N with Erlang and bignums this is trivial - I trust my
own code.

Now suppose I've gotten as far as decrypting and authenticating the
encrypted blog
of code, dare I *run* the code - this boils down to trust and is a
non-technical issue.

Do I trust the NSA not to have put a back-door in ssh? - no. Do I trust my
rsa code - yes.

People happly click on "install this code" "run this code" buttons because
they trust
the source.

If I still want to run the code anyway, despite the fact I mistrust the
source I can run it
on a sand boxed machine that is not connected to anything.

But again do I trust the USB memroy (or whatever) that I used to transfer
the program?

What If somebody installs a keyboard logger in the firmware of my keyboard?

It's all about trust

/Joe




2011/2/15 Frédéric Trottier-Hébert <fred.hebert@REDACTED>

>
>
> On 2011-02-14, at 18:38 PM, Ryan Zezeski wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > 2011/2/14 Frédéric Trottier-Hébert <fred.hebert@REDACTED>
> >
> > This has *nothing* to do with encryption, and everything to do with not
> understanding the potential threats of the web correctly. It is an
> application-level issue, much like XSS is. And it's pretty damn important.
> >
> >
> > Except when it isn't.
> >
> > You make a very impressive summarization of web security problems, but
> there are many apps where these problems go away because they simply, don't,
> matter.  For example, how about building a new interface to the appmon
> application using this with Raphael or Protovis?  Do I really need to worry
> about all this crap?  I'd argue, no.  If I'm using appmon it's behind a
> firewall and I trust the user to be competent.  Just like 'rm -f 'in unix.
>  Plus, who gives a sh*t (pardon my French) about a hijacked session when
> someone else just cracked your gateway because of default passwords.  My
> point being, there are so many doors, and this focuses on one.  Getting it
> right is very hard, and thus very costly, and that's why I think the first
> thing to ask is "Does this even need to be secure?"  Given enough time,
> anything can be had.
>
> I won't argue with this. You're right on this. Again I'll repeat myself by
> saying that as a general (and generic) pattern, the eval() in Joe's code
> worries me. Individual cases can be tested and proven safe on an individual
> basis without too much trouble.
> >
> > If nothing else Joe has stumbled upon a way to rapidly produce
> nice-looking and feature rich GUIs in Erlang, and yet it seems everyone has
> somehow missed this point and focused on security and support and whatnot.
>  I'm glad there are Joe's in the world, otherwise it would be a pretty
> boring place.
> >
> > Don't let perfect get in the way of good enough.  As Joe said, life is
> too [expletive deleted] short.
> >
> > -Ryan
>
> There is nothing wrong with what Joe is doing. There is nothing wrong with
> exploration. However, things already exist in Javascript and on the web in
> general and we shouldn't reinvent the wheel all the time because we might be
> coming from a different domain or we don't have the same experience as real
> web developers have.
>
>  You only have to look into what people are doing with node.js. Just look
> at this example:
> http://www.screentoaster.com/watch/stUE5XQEVMRFtXQ1xVXFlYVlZX/serrano_session_sharing
> These guys are doing session sharing over the browser (including mouse
> movement and everything).
> You can also look at the nodeknockout as a whole:
> http://nodeknockout.com/teams (some links are now dead). These include
> multiplayer browser games, chat systems, drawing applications, charts, etc.
> Dreamers and innovators are at work on the web already, they're just not
> necessarily doing it with Erlang.
>
> They are doing that kind of explorative nice-looking innovation we all find
> awesome (even if they likely don't do it 100% safe either).
>
> I'm sorry if I sounded patronising or just bossy around this discussion,
> it's just that there are fantastic ideas to be inspired from in what is done
> by these programmers all the time. They usually do it cleaner, safer and
> smarter. At least on the client side.
>
> If people can learn from Erlang when it comes to heavily concurrent and
> fault-tolerant applications, Erlang programmers can certainly learn from
> other domains when the developers working there are more specialised at what
> they do than we could be as a community in here.
>
>
> --
> Fred Hébert
> http://www.erlang-solutions.com
>
>