[Cosmo-dev] current-user-privilege-set and tickets

[Brian Moseley]

On 8/22/06, Jeffrey Harris <jeffrey at osafoundation.org> wrote:

> Recently I had a discussion with Brian about tickets and the WebDAV
> current-user-privilege-set (CUPS) property.  For those precious few not
> familiar with this property, WebDAV has a server calculated property for
> resources which, when queried, returns a list of privileges (read,
> write, etc.).

to be specific, it returns the privileges on the requested resource
for the currently authenticated principal.

> My feeling is that clients will only log in with one set of credentials,
> username or a ticket, and they just want to know what they can do on the
> server.  They don't care how they gained privileges.

that may be true for some clients, but i doubt it will be true for all.

> If I understand Brian correctly, he feels that tickets and user
> authentication are quite different and should not be conflated.

right. i suggested that we could support a (non-standard)
current-ticket-privilege-set. this would not break the abstractions of
cosmo's security model or confuse the modularity of the code.

note that you shouldn't merge the results of user or ticket privilege
queries. if the request carries user credentials, and that user has
created several tickets on the resource, then all of those ticket
infos will be reported in the ticketdiscovery property, even if they
have nothing to do with the request's authentication state. this is
another argument for having a current-ticket-privilege-set property.