Still using HTTP Basic Auth?

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:22:17 +0000

Great article by Steve Graham about why you should stop using HTTP Basic Auth immediately!

As well as being tremendously simple, HTTP Basic by itself is also tremendously insecure, i.e. it is implemented by simply Base64 encoding the username and password concatenated with a colon “:” character. It then follows that HTTP Basic should only be used, if at all, over securely encrypted connections.

Original article: WHY THE HELL DOES YOUR API STILL USE HTTP BASIC AUTH?

JavaScript filesystem database

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 18:33:00 +0000

I couldn’t resist and, after many conversations with Mário Valente, I challenged myself to build a complete JavaScript filesystem based database from scratch. In short, something like CouchDB but written in JavaScript and using a filesystem approach for document storage.

Some characteristics of this new database system:

fully written in JavaScript: nodeJS is my choice for its architecture and portability;
every document must contain only JSON data;
every document can be manipulated on the filesystem: the idea is to allow someone to edit a document using vim, for instance, without breaking anything. It also lets you easily backup, move or replicate your data without creating a heavy load on the database;
the underlying filesystem can be changed: changing the underlying filesystem offers numerous possibilities, like easy distribution (using OpenAFS, XTREEMFS or others), replication (using finefs or others), and even attaching different backends (using FUSE, for example);
the system must be available through an HTTP REST interface: this makes it very easy to immediately integrate the system into any existing applications. Bonus points if the API is compatible with CouchDB;
queries must be performed using a MapReduce approach: this should make it very easy to perform queries on a large dataset.

So, right now I’m half way through it. I managed to write the backend and I’m on my way to the HTTP REST interface. I’ll create a github repo after I have something functional that can be easily built and tested.

Http on Bruno Pedro

Still using HTTP Basic Auth?

JavaScript filesystem database