Security Features
Yaron Goland (yarong@microsoft.com)
Thu, 29 Aug 1996 17:43:11 -0700
After reviewing the security related messages on the groups I have
re-written section 3 of my document.
3. Access Control Features
When I speak of access control I mean the ability to associate a set of
allowable actions to be performed on a resource by an entity as defined
under a specified security protocol. Actions are HTTP methods with
specified associated tags. Resources are a URL or a URL which references a
group of URLs. Entities are defined by the particular security protocol
being referenced. The versioning standard should include how to specify
actions and resources but should only define an extension mechanism for
defining entities. It would be prudent to include in an appendix a syntax
for the definition of entities under commonly used HTTP authentication
methods such as the Authentication tag. Note that a server is not required
to accept access control suggestions. Each server has its own rules for how
actions, resources and entities should be divided and is free to enforce
those views. However error message should be used to inform the user of the
server's policies.
In addition means must be provided to discover what actions, resources, and
entities are available. However this information should also be under
access control. It would seem logical to provide support in HTML for
specifying access control features so that a server could provide users who
wish to set access controls with an HTML page whose formatting will help
the user assign access controls in a matter consistent with the server's
policies.
As access controls are the primary means for deciding how to share
information it is critical that we define a standard or each versioning and
distributed authoring package will define its own. This would not be such a
bad fate if only one or two people on a site needed to assign access
privileges. However everyone who owns a resource needs to set the access
privileges for that resource and if resources are to be shared across
systems then users who use different versioning and distributed authoring
packages need to be able to control access to resources on other systems.
This interoperable world is only feasible if methods to define access
controls are standardized.
Yaron