Rhodopis (Cinderella) and Mobile Object Security

Here is the reality: Kolona is as safe as Java and Java is as safe as it gets.  The logic is inescapable: Kolona is as safe as it gets.  This does not mean that there is any perfect security.  Security is always a question of a balance between the price for the security and the price to break the security.

 

Java security and, hence, Kolona security is based on the Java policy file.  Policy files in Java applications describe what objects can do what.  A particular Java process allows users to describe for themselves in their policy file what specific objects can do.  This is not related to whether or not the objects in question are mobile objects.  Mobile objects cannot sneak around users policy files.  The mobility does not require special measures.

Java is a practical language, not an academic language.  The language was meant to solve, not cause problems.  Java more specifically was meant to solve networking problems.  And, security is one of the network problems Java was and is meant to solve. 

Kolona from a security point of view should simply be seen as a set of Java classes.  There is nothing, nothing, I repeat, nothing about Kolona mobile objects that makes them more "iffy" security wise than other Java objects.  So, to understand Kolona security in this sense is to understand how security works with Java objects.  The policy file is the key.  If the user in the Java policy file does not allow a Java object to do what the object wants to do, the object cannot do it in that process. 

A caveat: "security" is concept covering a wide field and like "consumption" or "delinquency" includes matters which are incidentally but not logically or otherwise related.  There is, for example, the issue of cryptology in security.  Hamlet was a nuisance to Claudius, King of Norway, so Claudius sent him with Claudius's trusted agents, Rosencrantz and Guilderstern, bearing a note requesting that Hamlet be murdered on arrival in England.  When they arrived in England, the note was produced, saying that the trusted civil-servants should be dispatched and escaped in an unlikely plot twist involving pirates.  Hamlet the hacker had broken the code.  This, however, is not akin to the security issues that must be discussed with Kolona mobile objects.   The issue with objects is whether or not there is an invitation to the ball.

The Rhodopis story (generally known to us as Cinderella) is more apt.  The question in the case of Java classes security is whether or not the glass slipper fits.  There are no fairy godmothers with weird pumpkins to mutate objects into forms that do have invitations in Java.  But, Oh Joy, if there were, it would not matter.  If the policy file invites the object to do something, everything is going to be alright ever after.

We will discuss the details later and there are volumes in the literature.  But the bottom line is that Kolona mobile object technology is not a special case involving security.  Whatever networking solution one chooses, you can have less but not more security solutions than Kolona mobile object technology.  Kolona mobile objects are not executable files.  They are Java objects.