How not to use dbus (in cars or anywhere else)

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday 25 August 2015 15:23:13 Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Windows, we have to use TCP because there is no AF_UNIX, but we could
> maybe limit it to 127.0.0.1 and ::1.

Not to mention that the default is the TCP+Nonce method, which is a form of 
external authentication that requires the client to prove its identity by 
providing the contents of a file in the filesystem.

However, that transmission is done in plain text, so it's not suitable for 
remote authentication anyway.

Anything remote needs to provide its own encryption support. For example, 
AllJoyn sources provide their own encrypted connections and then provide 
another level of end-to-end encryption of the payload, inside the D-Bus 
network.

> However, removing support for TCP would break one of the use-cases for
> which D-Bus-over-TCP was designed: sharing a bus on a trusted LAN,
> alongside a NFS home directory, DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 (proving you can access
> $HOME) for authentication, and probably shared X11
> <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2008-July/010176.html>. This
> is clearly not very secure either - it requires absolute trust in every
> machine on your LAN, which was maybe acceptable in the late 90s/early
> 00s, but now it's 2015 and maybe that isn't relevant any more?

Is that the same as the Windows mechanism?

Anyway, this is relying on NFS security. If NFS is secure for you, who are we 
to disagree?

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
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