Re: BTP security

[Jim Webber <jim.webber@arjuna.com>]

Bill:

Some thoughts on the security draft thus far:

(35) Trust. You say that trust is not a technological issue. To some extent
I agree with that, but for the purposes of running a BTP transaction some
pieces of technology somewhere must agree to trust one-another. Now I am no
expert on trust protocols, but to say that it is not a technological issue
seems overly strong. Perhaps "not solely a technological issue" would be
more apt?

(30) Reliable Message Delivery

I'm not sure that reliable message delivery is particular a high level
security issue, particularly with something like BTP which runs on the
Internet, you expect messages to be lost. I agree with your later statment
(45-47) that such issues will be addressed by the core BTP protocol work (I
suspect via timeouts and suchlike).

(53) Auditing. Messages should be exchanged in a non-repudiable way. This
might well tie in with identifying actor instances (40) (i.e. you as an
actor have a signature with which you sign your messages). This would also
help with avoiding message tampering.

(110) There is no universal trust system in place. True. But service
providers will provide various BTP actors which will themselves be
"trusted." One could imagine some party offering a trusted coordinator for
example.

I'll ponder these more, but Bill Gates is about to start to I'll sign off
now :-)

Jim
--
Dr. James Webber
Hewlett-Packard Arjuna Lab
http://www.arjuna.com