Hi gang,
I've been happily working on our centralized account implementation.
It is not yet working, but I am happy to report that some of the major
design decisions have been made (by me). I want to share those with
you.
1. Account.haiku-os.org is modeled on the Google account service. So
to say, it is aware of the services (as opposed to OpenID, which just
authenticates everything under the sun). This restricts access to the
authentication procedures for services that are known to the server.
2. The account service is centralized. This means that all
authentication is done within the realm of the account service. Client
websites will not gather usernames and passwords themselves, but
rather redirect login requests to the account.haiku-os.org service. I
have designed an encrypted protocol for that. This is opposed to
having the accounts registered and maintained centrally, and then push
the accounts to the individual databases of the client services
(various reasons, ask me if you are interested). It is also different
from the client services asking for the password and then
authenticating the users against the central service themselves (by
transferring the account details over the internet).
3. As such, both Drupal and Trac need a customized plugin to
communicate with our centralized server. For Trac, this isn't going to
be a major issue, Drupal I don't know yet, but I think it should be
doable, based on the fact that Drupal already has 'custom'
authentication plugins (ldap and openid).
Anyway, I will write up a more detailed document when I have the time,
but for now I choose to spend my time on implementing the thing. I am
currently implementing the service in Ruby on Rails, because it allows
me to do some rapid application development. As soon as something is
somewhat working, I will share the source, but for now I will still be
fleshing out the internal details.
I hope I can show you more next week.
Niels
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