Steven Newhouse wrote:
It was discussed in the working group. My recollection was that there was no defined 'standard' mechanism for embedding a username and password into an scp uri. Therefore we did not feel happy specifying one.
I'd have thought in that case that going with the "generic URI" format for usernames and passwords would be the right thing then, leading to: scp://user:pass@host.com/path/to/file This will be pretty easy to implement (stripping the password out and passing it to the copier correctly won't be a big challenge). However, reading http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986 (the current definition of the generic URI format) leads to a problem with this, in that the embedding of passwords here is massively unsafe and leads to a range of troubles (including, but not limited to, making the document highly security-sensitive). I think we already knew that! (On the plus side, I don't think we need to worry so much about the issues documented in section 7.6 of that RFC for now; JSDL isn't a user-focussed format...) What we really need here is proper security delegation. That's the only solution which is actually of any real long-term good. This is just a (necessary) band-aid. Donal.