Item — HN Reader

I might have been making assumptions on CouchDB which aren't valid - that remote users could query all documents (== pages) to get the comments.

With my thing yes it can be crawled, since requests to /comments/ID will return the JSON comment-data. However there is no enumeration of the valid IDs possible, short of a dictionary attack. (This is where I was thinking that exposing CouchDB might expose more data.)

I did consider not storing emails, and for my use-case that's fine, but I figured sooner or later somebody will want to access them so ruling it out unduly would eventually result in a bug report.

1 comments

I might have been making assumptions on CouchDB which aren't valid - that remote users could query all documents (== pages) to get the comments.

Yes, you'd probably need to block that URL with a proxy, and only allow single page views to be requested. I think this is definitively a shortcoming of the BD; it should allow finer grained permissions.

However there is no enumeration of the valid IDs possible, short of a dictionary attack.

Well, by default CouchDB uses UUIDs, so enumeration shouldn't be possible either. Of course, both are subject to simple scraping of the HTML pages; a simple wget + grep can probably list them all, so you don't gain much, except for private pages you might have.

I did consider not storing emails, and for my use-case that's fine, but I figured sooner or later somebody will want to access them so ruling it out unduly would eventually result in a bug report.

Fair enough. I actually don't think CouchDB, as it is now, would necessarily be a better solution than yours. But the question is, why not? I believe the direction is correct, but the current implementation falls short, and that's a shame.