~~Kev
On Thu, 12 Nov 1998, Pete Chown wrote:
> ralf@uni-koblenz.de wrote:
>
> > Time for the politicians and
> > lawyer on this list to think about this and warm up their MUAs.
>
> Well, I'm not either, but here is an idea I had a little while back. I
> call it ActiveWhy for want of a better name...
>
> At the moment, when you download some code into your browser there are
> two possibilities. It might be Java, which is secure (to a greater or
> lesser degree) and crossplatform but slow, or it might be ActiveX which
> is insecure and proprietary but fast.
>
> An ActiveWhy control, however, is distributed as ANSI C source code and
> is automatically compiled by the browser using one of the freely
> redistributable C compilers. The resulting object file is then cached
> to speed up future accesses to the control. In addition, web site
> maintainers may, if they wish, include binaries for one or more
> platforms along with the source code. This will obviously make accesses
> to the control faster on those platforms while not ruling out the
> possibility of running the control on anything else.
>
> This gives us something like ActiveX but portable across platforms. Now
> we need security... Firstly it must be understood that unlike ActiveX
> and Java controls, ActiveWhy controls will always run in a separate
> process context. Under Linux, there will be a kernel module which will
> implement a new personality. This personality will deny the control
> access to any system calls which might be used to compromise security.
> Instead the control must perform all I/O through a pipe linked to the
> browser. The browser can then decide (using a scheme like Netscape's
> SecurityManager) whether to allow or deny a request.
>
> Under Windows this will not be possible (one of the drawbacks of
> proprietary kernels). Instead the control will be compiled to machine
> code for a simple yet efficient RISC processor. This code will then be
> interpreted.
>
> ActiveWhy controls, IMHO, will be useful in their own right; they
> provide a way of using the massive existing base of C code on the web in
> a secure way. Just as interesting, though, they provide a powerful
> incentive to browse the web through Linux rather than anything else...
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Pete Chown, email pc@skygate.co.uk, phone +44 (0) 181 680 8393,
> fax +44 (0) 181 680 8474, mobile +44 (0) 468 765 645,
> post 58 Foss Avenue, Croydon, CR0 4EU, England
>
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