Backend to SteamWorks

The SteamWorks system is a method of using LDAP for spreading configuration information. The TLS Pool can put this to good use for setting up its dynamicity-supporting databases. A backend to SteamWorks is integrated with the TLS Pool to simplify the attachment to this system, and thereby to enable provisioned control over that pesky thing called security.

The subdirectory pulleyback in the TLS Pool distribution builds a dynamic library, pulleyback_tlspool.so (or .dll on Windows) that can be loaded into the Pulley component of SteamWorks. The purpose of this library is to store information in the TLS Pool databases localid.db, disclose.db and trust.db when things change in subscribed LDAP sources.

We have created an LDAP schema extension that may be used to represent TLS Pool configurations in LDAP. This is intended to offer possibilities, but it is certainly not the only possible representation of data from which SteamWorks can configure the TLS Pool. If your system already has an LDAP structure that represents users, credentials and trust, then you can use that too.

The basic idea of SteamWorks and specifically of the PulleyScript language is that it can pick and choose from LDAP, and combine things found. As a matter of fact, Pulley surpasses the expressive power of LDAP queries by supporting relations and constraints to be applied between different objects; this makes LDAP as powerful to query as SQL — except that LDAP is a protocol standard, and can apply to any source that is LDAP-compliant.