“RE: Simple Cross-Network Scripting”

On 2/8/02, Clark Venable said:

>>In radio, this is a script that would be sitting on your machine, and
>>would be run before the page is uplaoded to the "cloud" or wherever
>>your site lives. The result of the script would be in the web page,
>>not the script itself: in other words, nobody sees your password.
>
>But before your workstation can render the page with the included
>script result (not the script), doesn't the workstation have to
>communicate with the server to get the result, and isn't that password
>sent in the clear?

Yes, but I didn't realize you were talking about that sort of thing.

There are solutions to that, including use of https instead of http (ssl, the same technology used for secure web pages), and there are probably other things I'm not thinking about right now.

Nothing that's currently built into Frontier.

Just keep in mind that this problem isn't specific to "Simple Cross-Network Scripting". It's the same for most everything else you do on the net, including ftp files to an unsecure server, or manage your radio blog in the cloud.

>>In fact, the only time I think anybody would see the password is when
>>you're intentionally sharing copies of your script. In that case, you
>>have to be careful to remove your password before sharing the script
>>with anyone... but that's true whenever you share a script.
>>
>>It's possible that I don't understand the specific situation you're
>>thinking about. :-)
>
>What I'm thinking of is that in health care, privacy regulations are
>coming online soon that are very specific with regards to encryptions
>of patient information (that's the extent of my understanding).

Actually, because of one of Macrobyte's customers, I'm very familiar with those new requirements.

SSL (or https) is the answer to that problem. You need encrypted communications. Frontier doesn't support it natively, but I know about a DLL that's been written which makes it possible, and this would also make it possible to do an encrypted form of xmlrpc.

That DLL isn't currently available for public consumption, but it proves that it can be done.

Seth