[MOBY-l] serving proprietary information (esp. attn. Richard Feldmann)

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hi all! 

Another issue that came up at the hackathon was the provision of
proprietary information; **** and I disagreed over my answer to
Richard's question a month ago; or at least, felt I had brushed off his
question without adequate discussion.

Re-reading my answer now, I can see his point - I didn't give the
question adequate thought, and in fact, I answered the question
incorrectly:  My answer was "we don't support this at this time", while
it should have been "this is a solved problem, and does not need to be
dealt with by us" :-)

As I understand it, the scenario Richard wants us to support is
protecting information from "prying eyes" until they have signed a
license agreement, or in a general case, limiting access to MOBY
Services to only certain people, while excluding others.

Since MOBY is built on SOAP, and MOBY-SOAP uses HTTP, and HTTP already
has authentication, then MOBY already has authentication.

I added a few lines to the Perl MOBY::Client::Service module that will
prompt the user for a username/password when they browse to a MOBY
Service that requires authentication.  Beyond this, it is up to you how
you decide who gets access and who doesn't; it is dealt with in exactly
the same way that you would limit access to any of your other web-based
pages/services (http.access file or whatever you prefer).  It does not
prevent your service from being **discovered**, but it does prevent it
from being *used*... which, if you think about it, is good advertising
:-)  (Preventing discovery is a whole different can of worms that I don't
want to deal with quite yet...)

Problem solved?  ... or did I misunderstand the problem?

Happy 

Mark



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