Anil Saldhana: Just want to have a general chat on this topic...

12:19 Anil Saldhana: Important for Stefan to participate.

12:19 Anil Saldhana: Flavia mainly because DML mentioned modules

12:20 Stefan: Ok, so app components must now support the declaration of security permissions. Besides, we need to consider setting up permissions for the modules

12:21 Anil Saldhana: previously,  ra.xml could contain security permissions

12:21 Anil Saldhana: now additionally permissions.xml can be provided

12:21 Stefan: right, I believe the model is pretty similar to the one found in ra.xml

12:22 Anil Saldhana: the bigger Q is should we support permissions in module.xml?

12:22 Anil Saldhana: we discussed that in Aug 2011 with no action.

12:22 Stefan: I believe we do. What do we do now when the sec manager is active and one of the modules contains code that needs permissions

12:23 Anil Saldhana: The key aspects for a security manager access check  includes CodeSource, Permissions and Subject

Anil Saldhana: CodeSource is driven by the classloader

12:24 Stefan: perms come from config and subject from the underlying sec context

12:25 Stefan: what happens now if sec manager is enabled on AS7? Do we have an AllPerm for all modules?

12:25 Anil Saldhana: I dont think so.  Right now, they are governed by the codesource url

12:26 Anil Saldhana: defined in the general policy file.

12:26 Anil Saldhana: DML wanted to see if we could add sec permissions at the module level

12:27 Stefan: I think it is a good idea but the amount of work required for that can be insane due to the number of modules

12:28 Anil Saldhana: it is NOT required for all modules. If admin wants to do for a select set of modules, he should be able to

12:29 Flavia: okay, so this does not affect MSC directly, it will affect Modules afaics

12:31 Anil Saldhana: Who does modules?

12:32 Flavia: I am not sure, but I think that mostly David

12:33 Flavia: I agree with Stefan that there could be a perf impact if we add this to every single module in AS

12:33 Anil Saldhana: Remember it is user's choice whether they run AS under a JSM

12:37 Anil Saldhana: hey DML. etherpad is insanely slow

12:37 dmlloyd: at least it's up.  This morning there was an outage

12:40 Anil Saldhana: I brought in your comments from the other ether here.

12:40 dmlloyd: My thought with modules is that they could request to be granted AllPermission by default

12:40 dmlloyd: that way we don't have to go through and retroactively redo every one

12:40 dmlloyd: but we can, later on, restrict modules if we want to

12:41 Anil Saldhana: Agree.

12:41 dmlloyd: my main motivation is to avoid having a global security policy file

12:41 dmlloyd: that's never been anything but a PITA

12:42 dmlloyd: by supporting it in modules we can establish permissions by class loader instead of code source

12:42 Anil Saldhana: the challenge is for a complete system, you will have to evaluate every module.

12:42 Anil Saldhana: if you have ALLPerm for unspecified modules

12:42 dmlloyd: we can simply compile and install the permissions as the modules are loaded

12:43 Anil Saldhana: where are they specified?

12:43 dmlloyd: in module.xml

12:43 dmlloyd: those would be the permissions the module requests, not necessarily the permissions they are granted

12:44 Stefan: ok, so we would be adding an AllPerm to every module.xml, leaving us with something that can be refined with timeso the idea is to add an AllPerm to every module.xml?

12:44 dmlloyd: ideally an administrator would also have their vote as to what permissions to use, and the effective permissions would be the union of the two

12:44 dmlloyd: yeah that's the idea

12:44 dmlloyd: really it's not so different from the EE7 rules - the deployment contains requested permissions, the administrator can further limit them, and the result is a union

12:44 Stefan: for some reason part of what I wrote was duplicated

12:45 dmlloyd: probably because etherpad is junk

12:45 Stefan: union or intersection

12:45 dmlloyd: intersection, sorry

12:45 Stefan: ah, ok

12:45 Anil Saldhana: I am fine with it.  We should discuss this with Jason and the list.

12:45 dmlloyd: cripes, I wonder how long I've been doing that.

12:46 Anil Saldhana: DML - permissions.xml can be in META-INF

12:47 Anil Saldhana: for web deployments, should they go in WEB-INF?

12:47 dmlloyd: I'd say META-INF only, unless the EE or servlet spec specifically allow for WEB-INF

12:47 Anil Saldhana: I thought web deployments typically used WEB-INF

12:47 Anil Saldhana: these are SE requirements for EE

12:47 dmlloyd: they do for web stuff

12:47 Anil Saldhana: so maybe META-INF

12:48 dmlloyd: but servlet is a rule-breaker in a lot of ways

12:48 dmlloyd: they do require META-INF for a few things too, by spec (though I think in some cases we allow WEB-INF)

12:49 Anil Saldhana: stefan , what do you think?  Allperm for all modules  and admin changes based on his requirement

12:49 Anil Saldhana: that is persistence.xml

12:50 Stefan: the only thing I would like to know is where the admin perms would be stored

12:50 Anil Saldhana: module.xml

12:50 dmlloyd: that is a big question, and also, what form should it take

12:50 Stefan: yeah

12:50 dmlloyd: for deployments I think the standalone/domain.xml should contain the admin policy, but I don't know what capabilities we should give it

12:51 dmlloyd: e.g. do we require the admin perm overrides to be present  at deploy time (assume AllPermission if not present), or do we have a general config that includes matching wildcards, or what

12:52 Anil Saldhana: we can leave it to the admin - AllPerm or denyall

12:52 Anil Saldhana: when we ship, we go with allperm

12:53 dmlloyd: my gut feeling is that we'll need something more nuanced than an all-on/all-off switch

12:53 Stefan: have to agree with david on this one

12:53 Anil Saldhana: domain.xml contains the default permission policy

12:53 Anil Saldhana: overrides happen in module.xml

12:53 dmlloyd: deployments do not contain a module.xml

12:53 Anil Saldhana: and permissions.xml/rar.xml

12:54 dmlloyd: for deployments we'd rely on META-INF/permissions.xml

12:54 dmlloyd: yeah

12:54 Anil Saldhana: right

12:54 dmlloyd: on the other hand, standalone/domain.xml permissions will not affect filesystem modules

12:54 dmlloyd: that global policy (if any) has to be statically defined somewhere

12:55 dmlloyd: like I said though - if we can avoid global policy files, that's best

12:56 dmlloyd: the policy file mechanism is defined by convention, not spec, therefore we shouldn't rely on it

12:56 Anil Saldhana: no requirement to go with policy file

12:58 dmlloyd: it implies though that if we do want an overriding global policy of some sort, it has to be of our own format, and it has to come from jboss modules

12:58 dmlloyd: so that jboss modules can merge the policy with that of the individual modules

13:00 Anil Saldhana: since modules is the building block, it makes sense to have it at the module level

13:00 Anil Saldhana: we definitely should think more from securing modules

13:00 Anil Saldhana: more from the perspective of securing the system via modules

13:03 dmlloyd: I'm not 100% brushed up on how protectiondomains and ACCs and all that stuff play together though

13:04 Anil Saldhana: I think once we start playing with it, we will see the challenges

13:05 dmlloyd: if one of you guys is already an expert that'd really help

13:05 dmlloyd: save some time

13:05 Anil Saldhana: this can actually be done in the modules project

13:06 Anil Saldhana: I mean test cases and performance measures

13:06 Anil Saldhana: what the SM does is very small IMO

13:06 dmlloyd: I can wire in the basic infrastructure to modules but a second/third pair of eyes would be good to have

13:06 Anil Saldhana: setting up the protection domains at the module CL level

13:06 Anil Saldhana: we will be there, DML

13:07 Anil Saldhana: I think I will start establishing some processes around this.  testing/configuration etc.

13:07 dmlloyd: that is but one task though

13:07 dmlloyd: I think that it might be a good idea to create a top-level JIRA with subtasks to track the individual work units, with a dependent relationship to the EE7 JIRA subtask

13:08 dmlloyd: work units like:

13:08 dmlloyd: descriptor parsing

13:08 Anil Saldhana: right

13:08 dmlloyd: DUP changes to install permissions into the module spec

13:08 Anil Saldhana: Action Items to the left here.

13:08 Anil Saldhana: I will set up the JIRA issues for the action items

13:08 dmlloyd: subsystem config

13:08 dmlloyd: etc.

13:12 Anil Saldhana: will list the action items here and start creating subtasks

13:14 dmlloyd: I guess that's about it, other than just testing

13:14 Anil Saldhana: right.  few minutes - check the action items here

13:15 Anil Saldhana: once you are happy, I can transfer to subtasks in JIRA

13:15 dmlloyd: I'd feel better if we had some plan for global module config, and an idea of how the global domain config might look

13:15 Anil Saldhana: we need to have that discussion.

13:16 dmlloyd: we can create a subtask placeholder for the domain config question and then open it up for discussion on the dev list

13:16 Anil Saldhana: right

13:16 Anil Saldhana: added some action items. take a look

13:17 dmlloyd: AS DUP implementation to merge descriptor information into the module definition

13:24 dmlloyd: I guess that's it for now

13:24 dmlloyd: we can always add more later as things come up

13:25 dmlloyd: did we lose Stefan?

13:26 Anil Saldhana: probably

13:26 Anil Saldhana: they have electricity issues due to summer thunderstorms in Brazil

13:31 dmlloyd: FYI the subtask in the EE7 task should stay right where it is

13:32 dmlloyd: you can't have a task hierarchy, so we need a new top-level JIRA that links back to that subtask

13:32 dmlloyd: with notes to close one when you close the other

13:32 Anil Saldhana: ok

13:32 Anil Saldhana: did not realize it was a subtask.