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I was thinking about how proxying would work. You could get very cool proxying, similar to the way AptProxy works, where you instead of accessing http://camlistore.org:3179/camli/hash-1, a client would access http://localproxy?url=http://camlistore.org:3179/camli/hash-.... It would parse the URL and see if a blob is being referenced that a local camlistore has cache, and serve out of that.

Then I looked at the camlistore sharing model. The proposal involves storing private data in blobs camlistore, protecting it behind a 401, and requiring the client to append a ?via=hash-2, where hash-2 is a claim that says "ok, let this data through". I'm not a big fan of that, because proxies won't reproduce your security model, and private data is stored in the clear.

What one should do, really, is store private data encrypted. Then, you can reference a "phantom blob", which is not actually an object in storage but represents the cleartext of the private data. Your claim could now be a recipe on how to reconstruct this phantom blob, i.e. get chunk X of ciphertext and decrypt it with this key.

Now, dumb proxies won't just store sensitive stuff in the clear (although, they would store enough data that the plaintext could easily be reconstructed), but at least your security model is preserved.



Encryption should occur higher in the app layer. For cache privacy everything should be over https and avoid proxies. There are uses for fully public blobs too and those do not have these issues.




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