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Sandstorm is interesting, but I didn't realize it had this sort of DNS requirement. This will also mean it will essentially require a wildcard ssl certificate f
by resoluteteeth 11y ago
Sandstorm is interesting, but I didn't realize it had this sort of DNS requirement. This will also mean it will essentially require a wildcard ssl certificate for people who want to completely host it themselves, which could seriously limit its uptake.
- nl 11y agoIf you are using it for your own use, you can use a self-signed certificate. I think that browsers will warn you if your self-signed certificate changes, even in the absence of certificate pinning (because it is a new-untrusted certificate). If not, then something like certificate patrol[1] should help. And let's face it - if you are using Sandstorm for the next year or so, you probably understand what a self-signed certificate is. [1] http://patrol.psyced.org/ http://patrol.psyced.org/
- kentonv 11y agoTL;DR: We're working on that one; stay tuned. ;) Long version: Yes, Sandstorm requires a wildcard host for security purposes. In general, by splitting things up into lots of small, isolated units, we can protect against bugs in apps. For example: - First, obviously, hosting each app on a separate origin (hostname) is important if you don't want a bug in one app to allow compromise of other apps or Sandstorm itself (or if you want to run apps that you don't necessarily trust). Since we want app installation to be a one-click process, we need to generate hostnames automatically. But we go a lot further than just allocating a host for each app. - By hosting every Etherpad document in a separate, isolated container, we can protect you against bugs in Etherpad that leak information from one document to another. Several such bugs have been disclosed in the last few months; none affected Etherpad on Sandstorm. - By hosting Wordpress's edit interface on a separate host from the public web view -- guarded by Sandstorm access control -- and making the public view read-only, we can protect you against security problems in Wordpress. Several such bugs have been disclosed in the last few months; none affect Wordpress on Sandstorm. - By creating a new unguessable throw-away host name for every session -- i.e. every time you open the same document, it's on a different host, and that host expires when you close it -- we can protect against XSRF, clickjacking, and reflected-XSS attacks in apps, because the attacker does not know to what hostname to address the attacks. So there's a lot of really huge advantages to having a wildcard host available. The big disadvantage is that wildcard SSL is expensive -- around $100/yr at its cheapest. But that's an artificial price based on CA's perception that wildcard certs are only needed by people who can pay a lot -- it doesn't cost them any more to create the certs, they're just doing price segmentation. So instead of solving the problem by giving up on our nice security properties in order to make non-wildcard certs work, maybe we can solve the problem in meatspace by convincing the CAs that Sandstorm calls for a different pricing model. And that's all I can say for the moment. :)