Introducing Pond: A New RSS+Atom Syncing Protocol

https://arturovm.me/post/introducing-pond.html

by ArturoVM • 13 years ago

17 14 13 years ago

grinich• 13 years ago

You might consider changing the name. There's a new crypto messaging project started by some folks at Google called Pond:

https://pond.imperialviolet.org/

https://github.com/agl/pond

It's pretty much impossible to avoid naming collisions for projects. :-/

ArturoVM7• 13 years ago

Yeah, I caught that :/ thanks!

I have been working on the project for 6 months now, and I even tweeted the author of that project when he posted it, but he just ignored me haha :(

tptacek• 13 years ago

Pond is probably more than 6 months old, and is an important project. If I were in your shoes, I'd just change the name.

Hopefully, in a couple years, we'll know Langley's Pond by a different name: "email".

nl2• 13 years ago

It's not really a syncing protocol - a syncing protocol is something more like FeedSync (formally SSE)[1].

This looks more like an API for a feed reader type application. From a quick read it looks mostly ok for that (although I'd question why...)

Out of interest, why not implement a read-only version of rfc5023/AtomPub[2]?

Anyway...

I'd suggest you get rid of the "Article" Object, and use the Atom "Entry" object instead (or possibly a single-entry Atom feed if you are in XML mode), serialized as JSON

The "Fetch" call should probably take a "since date" as an option, instead of just "since id". It should return a JSON serialized Atom feed, not a custom object.

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ABDERA/JSON+Seri... is a pretty decent JSON serialization spec for Atom

Notable omissions: no concept of tagging or saving articles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedSync

[2] http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/rfc5023.html

ArturoVM7• 13 years ago

Thank you for your feedback (and the links).

Changing "Article" to "Entry"—noted. As for doing away with the custom schema and using the Atom serialization you posted: it's worth noting the protocol is meant to sync with Atom _and_ RSS transparently; to keep things simple and consistent, a middle ground has to be found.

`since_date` is something I'm working on.

nl2• 13 years ago

Atom is a superset of RSS (to be more precise, it's a superset of all the different RSS dialects, properly specified).

EvanAnderson• 13 years ago

It's hard to take this seriously when you're making up your own authentication protocol-- and one that uses MD5 at that.

ArturoVM7• 13 years ago

TLS/SSL will be a requirement soon, with some form of "bearer token" auth scheme. At least for the reference implementation.

The MD5 hash is there to mitigate two issues, currently: some (or most) common users won't pay for a certificate, so instead of sending the password in cleartext, it's hashed as an MD5 to avoid exposure—all of this, of course, is no guarantee against MITM. Which leads us to the second issue: most [non–techie] users re–use their password for a _lot_ of things. At least, if the password is intercepted, it won't be reusable.

It's also worth noting that bcrypt is used server–side to store passwords.

Auth (and very possibly a crypto scheme too) is yet to be tackled. Haven't even decided if it should be part of the spec, or left up to each implementer.

marshray• 13 years ago

Transmitting MD5(password) is really no better than just sending the password (except maybe for the top 20% or so strongest passwords).

al2o3cr• 13 years ago

+1 to this. If you're going to send a replayable MD5 hash over the wire, you might as well just drop the pretense and just call it "password" instead - intercepting the "hash" compromises the account just as surely as if you'd leaked the password.

This is especially nasty since the document mentions that not all users will use SSL. If supporting access via a non-secure channel is an absolute requirement, you may want to figure out something more effective...

ArturoVM7• 13 years ago

Sure :) It's something I'm working on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6798707

Introducing Pond: A New RSS+Atom Syncing Protocol

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