How about somthing lke this, people who LL trust to make good viewers get a key to sign their binaries, the source code as it has been pointed out already is tooo pliable to be trusted. Viewers that got the LL signature are viewers that were copiled into binary by people LL trusts.
This wouldn't make any difference in regards to avoiding malicious viewers illegally reproducing data, but it would serve to help users avoid malicious binaries that would harm them. There should be a simple way to check if the binary is signed with an authroized LL key that hasn't been revoked yet, so people would easilly verify the authenticity of whatever viewer they download. The exact requirements to receive a LL key should be discussed separately, this proposal is just about the underlying system for the "registry of LL trusted viewers" thing The actual grid servers wouldn't need to know anything about this, it's just about keeping the user safe when choosing viewers. But the servers might be involved in the verification proccess, as well as being made aware of the status of viewers, so for example, people could only allow LL signed viewers on their sim, or even an additional bit of data for assets that tells the server to only send that asset to LL signed viewers. Of course we can't expect all the people LL trusts with keys to forever manage to maintain them secret, so keys can be revoked, and with specific keys for each trusted developers, simply don't send a new key to the developer that leaked their key when renewing keys after the revocation (with a decent legal system so people can resort in case they believe they've been unfairly accused of not being trustworthy) Since this isn't somthing that needs to happen in real time and stuff, use a key size so big that not even quantum computers can break with bruteforce before the heat death of the universe . Of course there is still the issue of something external to the viewer running in paralell, or with a man-inthe-middle attack snatching the data that was server tot he trusted viewer, there isn't a solution for that, we don't need to think about it. It's like that saying "You can do somthing about it? Then there is no point worrying.You cannot do anything about it? Then there is no point worrying" (I can't rememebr the exact words, but that's the general idea) _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
