Subject: Questions about ACL speical ids, evaluation, and ACE processing

From: Carl Burnett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 09:32:14 -0500

From the 03-01 draft of the RFC, I have questions on the ACL sections.

Special Identifiers -

Does EVERYONE include both authenticated and unauthenticated users?
Where is it evaluated with respect to ANONYMOUS and AUTHENTICATED,
before or after?

What exactly defines an AUTHENTICATED access? Would the case of a server
mapping a valid RPCSEC-GSS principal to a local cred of nobody be an
an AUTHENTICATED or ANONYMOUS access?

Similarly, what are the exact cases that map to an ANONYMOUS access? Would
that be cases like a RPCSEC-GSS principal that can't be accepted, or an
AUTH_SYS request mapped to nobody, or an AUTH_NONE access?
Should AUTH_SYS even be considered as authenticated?

Also, what are people assuming about cases of duplicate entries in an
ACL?  Should an error result if one of the special identifiers appears
twice? What if a user or group ACE is in the ACL twice? Should this be an
error? Should the duplicate entries be merged, etc? Does the server
need to check the ACEs for this type of stuff in a SETATTR?

Details on these aspects of the ACL model need to be in the spec. They
are key to understanding the evaluation semantics.

Carl Burnett
AIX Kernel Architecture - Distributed File Systems
(512) 838-8498, TL 678-8498
(please reply to [email-masked])