Inter-app access control

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Things to understand about the current situation as of 2018/10. You need to distinguish between different sorts of aps.

  • If you install a native app on you mac or pc, under mac os, linux, etc, then it runs under you control with full privilege, like Word or Quicken, or Chrome. The OS doesn’t give us the ability to stop it accessing anything you as a person can access. Desktop apps are trusted.

  • If you run a web app in a web page, the browser does severely limit its access to anything on the web, using the Same Origin Policy, and in complicated way allows limited access between different web apps, where a web app is defined by the domain, “origin”, likefoo.solid.community. Web apps are not trusted. That’s largely why each user gets a different domain. In solid, if you try to get at data from a web app, then the web app AND you must BOTH have the access required in the Access control system. You do this with the ACL by making an Authorization which has an origin property. Because that is a bit fiddly, we are also thinking about giving the publisher of data a way to say, in their public profile, a list of webapps they trust and will allow users to use with their own data.

  • If an app runs as a service at a remote place on the internet, some other computer out there, then it can only get access to the your data by logging in just like a person. It has to be set up with a way of storing the password (or certificate) it uses in a secure way. You then give it access just like a person. You can put it in groups, even. so yo can allow myimaginaryphotoprintigservice.com to have read access to your photos. Remote services are agents which are authorized just like people .

  • If an app runs on a locked-down system like iOS, the operating system can limit its access. As far as I know, IoS, while it does allow you to block an app from accessing the web, there isn’t as far as I know yet a way in which it warns the server which app is going the access (like the browser does for a web app). The solid code cannot control iOS apps. Apple does. iOS apps are trusted if (but only if) you give them network access.

So when we talk about authentication of apps, we have to distinguish between these situations. The most pressing case is webapps, the most complex, and the place where we can potentially addd more functionality specifically to the solid platform.

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