Am Mittwoch 10 November 2010, 08:38:58 schrieb [email protected]: > Hello all, > I've a question. I'm currently looking at opimd code with a view to > perhaps rewriting it in vala. That, as far as I know, was always on the > list of things to do and as an education to myself I thought it might be a > usefull exercise. I mean it's not critical as opimd is there and works > well so it's a handy starter exercise.
Nice to hear, that someone tries to do fsopimd :) > Anyhow whilst mulling over things in my head I remebered that in recent > weeks Android was hit by the shocking revelation that some installed apps > were transmitting Personal Data to remote parties. Then there was the > further shocking info that the iPhone suffers from the same problem. And now the next shocking, every PIM service i know has this problem. On your PC every Game could access your akonadi/eds/windows adressbook because they are all accessable with dbus or other "remote" technics. > I'm thinking that there ain't a whole pile you can do to secure PIM data, > especially in an Open Source, implementation. That's what I'm thinking and > I'll readily admit that I don't know squat about securing data. It seems to > me that the first step to securing the data is saying that only the SHR > supplied apps can access this data. That's not really good for choice > which is one of the mail advantages of Open Systems. Even if you said that > only SHR supplied apps could access this info if the apps source is > readily available then you've achieved nothing. > > I've admitted that I know squat but is there anybody who can offer a clever > idea which might be used to secure PIM data. I'm just curious. The only practical way i can think of is to ask the user if he allows that app to access the PIM data. One can do that once for every app if it's accessing the PIM data for the first time. That way he can install his favorite contacts application, he is allowed to give his contacts to facebook with such an app and so on... > And don't mention that the phone runs as root at present so it ain't the > most secure. That's another discussion that I know squat about. In the > ideal world where the phone did not run as root how would you secure PIM. > I suppose that might well be the answer different user id's. Hmm only user > "pim" or group "pim" can read pim data. Still that probably curtails > third party developers writing a really cool app. They'll have to be able > to access PIM. If we run the userspace as non root then we have just one user and he is in the pim group or not. And as opimd is user specific content every user should have it's own opimd. Because of that i think a pim group isn't practicall. And we are using dbus, which has no user/group system. Everyone who knows the bus can access it. I don't even know if it's possible to get the name of the programm which send the message to the bus... If we can't then it's insecure by design. > Catch 22 you either have an open system that allows third party apps or you > have secure data. Somehow yes :) But for now we have the advantage that we can access the source of every app running on our phone. And so we can see if any app accesses opimd which shouldn't be allowed. But this works only as long as we don't have properitary apps. Regards Thomas PS: A better place for this discussion would be smartphones- [email protected] _______________________________________________ Shr-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shr-project.org/mailman/listinfo/shr-devel
