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Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2009 08:27:41 -0800
Message-ID: <e282921e0902030827x19c7c1ceob0729a30b281a4b7@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: "safe" access to CouchDB?
From: Chris Anderson <jchris@apache.org>
To: user@couchdb.apache.org
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On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:49 PM, Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> wrote:
> I'm interested in finding out how to provide "safe" access to
> CouchDB from untrusted (and possibly malicious) code.  What
> can I do to allow queries, but make sure that no destructive
> activities (including major denials of service) are allowed?
>

If you want to avoid denial of service, you should not allow
temp_views to be generated by end-users.

For document control, if your application can set a trusted "author"
field on the doc (perhaps from session) then you can use CouchDB's
validation functions in a bunch of interesting ways.

Sofa has a fairly complex validation function which manages both blog
posts and anonymous comments:
http://github.com/jchris/sofa/blob/master/validate_doc_update.js

Line 20 of that validation function is my hack to provide some more
session support for Sofa admins. It's not a good pattern to follow but
you shouldn't need to do it if you have an application server. Fixing
sofa's sign-in hack is on my todo list.

Or see the test suite for more examples.

-- 
Chris Anderson
http://jchris.mfdz.com