[OLPC Security] Application bundles and delegation

Ka-Ping Yee laptop at zesty.ca
Wed Feb 7 17:27:37 EST 2007


Hello, Ivan!

I felt very encouraged upon reading the Bitfrost specification today.
Congratulations on what you've accomplished so far.  It makes me very
glad to see the up-front acknowledgement, in your introduction, of the
key problem in security -- the wholesale granting of authority that
happens when applications "run as" users.  When I saw Simson's name
and the O'Reilly book mentioned I was even more excited.  You might
want to look at the ideas in Chapter 13 of that book, if you haven't
already.

I've been looking for ways to get involved in OLPC since attending a
talk by Mary Lou last fall, and I hope participation here will be one
way to start making a useful contribution.

My reading of the specification prompted a couple of questions.

A few points in the spec allude to "application bundles" -- which
sounds like a great idea for managing installed software.  If that's
what it sounds like, it should tremendously simplify not only the
installation and removal of programs but also keeping straight which
program is responsible for what.  Is there a specification of the
application bundle system in more detail that I can read somewhere?
Is there an API that the installer provides to distributed packages?

Somewhat related to that, what are your thoughts on delegation
between applications?  When a program launches another program or
invokes a library routine to carry out a task, how are authorities
transferred from one to the other?  Perhaps the more technical
document will talk about this?

Thanks very much!


-- Ping


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