[patch] RFC: Netx plugins

[Lillian Angel]

Hi,

A couple of concerns...

Francis Kung wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> See attached for a patch that changes gcjwebplugin to run applets 
> through Netx, consolidating IcedTea "web services" into one place.  An 
> overview of the major / possibly contentious changes:
>
> - added an "icedtea-compile" stamp in the makefile for the actual 
> OpenJDK build.  This is needed as the new IcedTea is used to build 
> netx (I've introduced some API changes, relaxing visibility in 
> sun.applet.*).  Note that the lack of "touch 
> stamps/icedtea-compile.stamp" is intentional, to remain consistent 
> with current behaviour.
>
> - combined the icedtea-plugin and icedtea-jnlp-launcher patches into 
> one file so they apply/revert cleanly
>
> - need to pass --enable-netx-plugin to enable this (considering it an 
> experimental feature); all this does is create netx.jar in 
> j2sdk/jre/lib with netx code in it.  If this jar is missing, we fall 
> back to using the old Sun plugin code (see the reflection bit in the 
> sun.applet.PluginAppletViewer constructor).  I'm creating a new 
> netx.jar, instead of using j2sdk/lib/tools.jar (like javaws does), so 
> that the plugin can be distributed with a JRE rather than requiring 
> the full SDK.

Should --enable-netx-plugin be set by default? In my opinion, everything 
is experimental. There should only be an option to disable netx.

>
> - modified the default security policy to grant all permission to 
> ${java.home}/lib/netx.jar  (is this safe, or is there a better way to 
> accomplish this?)

We should never allow a user to allow an application to grant all 
permissions. I think we need to make these type of apps as secure as 
possible and be sure we ask each time. What about having a whitelist? 
Also, I don't think it would be in the best interest to have the default 
security policy so lax.

>
> This isn't complete, but it's finally in a working state and has been 
> in a private repo for too long... currently a dialog is displayed for 
> all applets asking if the user wants to grant it full permission or not.  

Is the dialog displayed for each applet or just the first applet is 
loaded? if "grant full permissions" is selected, are the permissions 
granted for all applets or only that particular one?  I think we should 
display if for each applet. (Not sure if I misunderstood the previous 
point as well)

> The plan is to re-use Josh's work on Netx jar-verifying to tweak this 
> dialog and only display it when needed; we can also create a 
> consolidated JNLP/plugin settings GUI (cache management, trusted 
> certificates, etc).
>
> Comments, or good to commit? 


Hold off for now. Have you run your patch by fitzsim?


Great work :)
Lillian