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atsign-foundation / at_protocol

The open source repository for the atProtocol specification and supporting documentation
https://docs.atsign.com
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Make some keys immutable #65

Open gkc opened 1 year ago

gkc commented 1 year ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently it is possible for an authenticated client to make problematic updates. Currently we try to avoid client software doing these problematic things; however we need a mechanism to prevent these updates occurring.

Here are some of the keys whose values should not be permitted to be overwritten

Describe the solution you'd like

For public:publickey@alice and privatekey:at_pkam_publickey we should prevent their value being modified by client updates (i.e. the update verb handler)

For shared_key.bob@alice we should also prevent the value being modified by client updates.

We should allow metadata to be updated. TBD whether there is some metadata which we should prevent being updated

Describe alternatives you've considered

As the concept of limiting updates to data after its initial creation may have broader applicability, we could introduce a new metadata field, 'immutable', which defaults to false

However we could also just start by putting guards around the three keys named above.

Additional context

No response

gkc commented 1 year ago

Marking for discussion at an architecture call before we move to implementation

XavierChanth commented 1 year ago

Thoughts:

With an immutable key (i.e. immutable=true in the metadata) it would be good to disable edits (i.e. put) but still allow deletion. In addition, require some sort of override/force flag to be set to true when deleting an immutable key.

Zambrella commented 1 year ago

Idea: Add a re-authentication step to potentially harmful actions (e.g. mutatating keys that shouldn't be mutated). This would at least likely stop a bug from doing something it shouldn't.