DeskWeb/trust

DeskWeb trust controls

At some point, we'll want to make it possible for developers to distribute scripts to people who may not trust them (e.g. if you want to interact on a distributed social network, you'll need to run the scripts for it -- but unlike server-based apps, these would have read/write access to all of your files if executed normally).

We'd want to implement two measures, then:

• A way to authenticate scripts as being the versions approved by their authors.
  • DeskWeb should be able to access signed hashes of approved releases.
  • DeskWeb users should be able to designate levels of trust for each known signer.
• Complete sandboxing of most scripts, with user-approval of specific types of access (much the same way Android does).

"Complete sandboxing" would mean that an app would not be able to see anything outside of its own files, and could only access system functions via the DeskWeb app.