modred team mailing list archive

[Michael Cohen <gnurdux@xxxxxxxxx>]

It seems to me that dealing with privacy concerns is an extremely 
problem-specific issue.  In any given case you need to work out how much 
you can give to people without letting private information leak, but the 
details vary greatly from problem to problem.  That isn't our business, 
and I don't think we should concern ourselves with it too much.  The way 
I see it there are two options:

1. make this designed for stuff without privacy concerns
	I think this is both the easiest and the best option.  I don't really 
like the idea of a public, free service doing computations for an evil 
corporation anyway; if it's being done BY the public it should be done 
FOR the public.

2. add in a small amount of functionality designed to facilitate dealing 
with privacy concerns
	At the level of this project, that would probably just be the controls 
on what data gets sent to what people.  There might be reasons for 
adding such controls anyway; some tasks could be designated for only 
"trusted" users.

Either way I doubt that this will be a big issue.  I think maybe a 
bigger issue is how to run arbitrary code efficiently and securely.

I see only a few solutions

	Don't allow arbitrary code, but only a defined set of tasks.  Or, 
similarly, allow some "trusted" set of tasks, each separately ported to 
each platform (like boinc).

	Use Java.  This lets us easily sandbox it and is cross-platform, but 
sacrifices a bit on efficiency.  Also, Java can be annoying (although 
other JVM languages would also work in this situation).

	There are ways of running cross-platform, C/C++ code in a sandbox as 
well.  One possibility is to use LLVM, although the LLVM developers 
specifically say that LLVM is NOT designed to be used this way.  Another 
possibility is to use a sandboxed code system that works on multiple 
operating systems but only on x86.  This includes things like VX32, 
which is apparently portable to Windows, but hasn't been ported.  I 
don't know whether or not that sort of thing is within our abilities. 
Another option might be Google Native Client; that is designed to be 
used in a web browser but I don't know how hard it would be to "rip out" 
the sandboxing/cross-OS x86 code stuff.

Michael Cohen