Re: [DotGNU]Authentication against Microsoft's "Passport" system?

[Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r)]

I agree very much with the statements in your email. Since Mono seems to
be going to support hooks for passport, that will allow developers who
need it to use the stuff from Mono, and the rest of the DotGNU project
can stay away from that *evil* mess.
Besides, during the OSCON Mundy made it clear they intended to enforce
their patents... even against free software developers.

Seek3r

Norbert Bollow wrote:
> 
> DotGNU will support multiple bytecode formats; one of them will
> be Microsoft's IL.  While on Microsoft platforms, IL-based
> Portable Executables may be hard-coded to use Microsoft's
> "Passport" authentication system, on the DotGNU platform the end
> user will at least have the option to override that.  In fact I
> personally think that the way to go will be to officially declare
> Microsoft's "Passport" authentication system to be *evil* and
> boycott it altogether.  I think that we should instead make it
> easy for vendors of proprietary software to support an
> alternative, non-centralized authentication system so that their
> software will run on the DotGNU platform.
> 
> Since DotGNU is Free Software, that does not stop those who are
> interested in the success of the "Passport" system (Microsoft,
> Inc. comes to mind) from releasing patches for DotGNU that add
> support for the "Passport" system.
> 
> If you want DotGNU to include support for the "Passport" system,
> you may possibly also have legal problems in addition to the
> ethical and PR problems:
> 
> As far as I know, Microsoft has not even published an API for
> its "Passport" authentication system yet.  From a published
> explanation of how the system works, I know that it is a very
> simple system, and hence I'm sure that it would be trivial to
> reverse-engineer it.  However, in DotGNU we must be very careful
> to avoid stepping over any legal boundaries, and it is not clear
> whether Microsoft's license agreements allow reverse-engineering.
> 
> (I say "it is not clear" because the parts that explicitly
> forbid reverse-engineering may in fact legally be null and
> void.)
> 
> Tony Stanco is working on putting together a legal team for
> DotGNU.  As soon as this team is in place I will ask this
> question:
> 
>   "Is it within my rights to analyse how the 'Passport'
>   authentication system works exactly, and then publish a paper
>   on any security problems and design flaws that I may find?"
> 
> > So, DotGNU is something that help Windows spread its liscensing regime to
> > more places.
> 
> Defintately not !!!!
> 
> Greetings, Norbert.
> 
> --
> A member of FreeDevelopers and the DotGNU Core Team   http://dotgnu.org
> Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet  (near Zurich, Switzerland)
> Tel +41 1 972 20 59      Fax +41 1 972 20 69      http://thinkcoach.com
> Your own domain with all your Mailman lists: $15/month http://cisto.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Developers mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://dotgnu.org/mailman/listinfo/developers