Re: [9fans] securing venti and fileservers was: (vac errors after updating to latest p9p archive)

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@coraid.com>]

> 0) Venti contains neither authentication nor authorization. If you
> care, you are advised to stick it on a trusted network, or listen only
> on loopback.
>
> 1) The venti protocol reserves space for auth (see VtTauth0 and
> VtTauth1 in /sys/include/venti.h), but I'm pretty sure nobody
> implements it. Certainly I haven't found any definition of those
> fields.

it is typical to not do authentication or authorization on
block-level storage.  venti may be fancy, but it's still block storage.
iscsi notwithstanding, storage networks tend to be pretty locked down.

> 4) There's always ssl or the like. Some people argue that's the best
> path to take; I'm less convinced.

i think it makes a lot of sense to use ssl like a streams module.
push it when necessary.  (venti already requires a streaming
protocol, so this isn't a big loss.)

for a lower-level solution, you could also use various flavors of vpn.

- erik