From: autodesk!robertj@uunet.UU.NET (Young Rob Jellinghaus)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: DESIGN: Security (was Re: DESIGN: doors between worlds)
Date: 14 Aug 92 18:04:08 GMT
Article-I.D.: u.1992Aug17.063556.23992
Organization: Autodesk Inc., Sausalito CA, USA
Originator: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu



In article <1992Aug12.085135.19434@icf.hrb.com> jtt@icf.hrb.com (Jack
Taylor) writes:

>How about when I initially connect to the "router" I get placed in a
>"waiting room" (Can't you picture it, plants, some dog-eared old
>magazines, elevator muzak), which contains portals for all the worlds
>that router knows about. From there I can select the world I want to
>enter. World creators don't necessarily know about all the other world
>creators in a manner which would allow them to simple attach worlds
>arbitrarily.

This reminds me of the other compelling reason for some kind of world-
portal mechanism: security.  If I create a virtual world of my own, I
don't want anyone to be able to get into it unless I grant them
permission.  Permission in this sense means creating a portal to my
world and giving it to someone else.  Likewise, I shouldn't be able to
access anyone else's world unless they have said it's OK.  A world
that I don't have permission to access will simply never become
accessible to me through any portal I can reach.

Any VR system which doesn't support portals will have trouble defining
access boundaries.  And simple access isn't the only issue; what about
modification?  What if you let someone into your world, and they start
trashing the place?  Can you throw them out?  How?  Can you just
restore your world from a backup and leave the other copy of the world
for them to destroy?  This starts looking like a many-worlds inter-
pretation of cyberspace.

Likewise, any VR system that does support multi-user, secure worlds
will need navigation mechanisms that don't assume you can enter any
world in the cyberspace.  This starts getting into issues of secure
personal identity in cyberspace (how do you know that dragon at your
portal is really your friend?), not to mention money (a thriving
cyberspace will eventually need to support paying to enter particular
worlds, or to access particular information; the "cyberspace mall"
won't happen without it).

All of these are beyond the scope of the VR standard under discussion,
but it's important to remember that the current VR standard is only a
piece of the software structure that will comprise a fully-fleshed-out
cyberspace.  If the standard can define routing and rendering
protocols that can implement portals or some equivalent way of
transiting between worlds, then the security features and everything
else can be built on top of it.  If the standard specifies something
silly like "all worlds the router knows about are accessible to
everyone", it'll start breaking down once people actually begin
rolling their own spaces.

John Eagan made some point about how all these otherdimensional,
mathematically-hairy interpretations of cyberspace aren't needed.  I
agree, to a point.  Any cyberspace standard needs to be internally
consistent, so layers can be added on top of it without compromising
the lower-level semantics, or creating a system which is easily
crackable.  It's not trivial to design a secure open system, but
that's what a good cyberspace has to be.  And finally, any cyberspace
that does support these weird world-transit mechanisms will need a
rigorous definition of how the virtual physics works, otherwise the
whole thing will be spaghetti code that crashes the first time you
try to toss an elephant through a hanky-size portal.

--
Rob Jellinghaus                | "Next time you see a lie being spread or
Autodesk, Inc.                 |  a bad decision being made out of sheer
Internet: robertj@Autodesk.COM |  ignorance, pause, and think of hypertext."
AMIX: RJELLINGHAUS             |    -- K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds