Authenticake

Aims to be a highly versatile and easy-to-use authentication black-box.

#Motivation

Authenticake provides the Authenticated type. This is nice to have because it identifies, in the types, something which is authenticated within some domain-specific context.

This type, for instance, guarantees that launchMissiles is called only if the program has authenticated () in the MissileSilo context:

launchMissiles :: Authenticated MissileSilo () -> IO ()

The use of () indicates that we have a kind of user-free authentication, like a house key: the key is the same for all key holders, but varies from door to door (MissileSilo is the door in this anology).

User-based authentication is possible as well. A hypothetical banking program might contain this type:

withdraw :: Authenticated BankAccount Client -> IO WithdrawReceipt

In this case we know that withdraw is called only if there is some authenticated client; that client can be obtained through the function authenticatedValue, and then used to do further work.

#Drivers

There are four drivers in this repository:

• Strict : never authenticates anything
• Nice : authenticates everything
• File : uses a text file to store username, password pairs with no obfuscation
• Password : uses a Haskell Map to store username, password associations

But these are probably not very useful.