[saag] Re: QUIC-ify everything?

[Benjamin Kaduk <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2026 at 06:26:18PM +0200, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 
> Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]> wrote:
>     > I have just mounted a share from my internal NAS on the proxmox
>     > host and can view the files on it from that host and at no point
>     > did I give an account, password or any other form of
>     > authentication. Is the state of the art really so lame? Am I seeing
> 
>     > All it would take to create secure NFS would be to run the RPC
>     > calls over QUIC.
> 
> That's not really the hard part.
> The hard part is mapping the credential used to a file system (Unix ID) on
> the server.   And you might want more than one mapping: N:M

Yes, identity-management is the hard part.  Because your NFS-protocol
client (i.e., host) probably only has one identity, but may (in the general
case) have more than one user, and then your identity mapping problem gets
a lot more exciting.

Over in AFS-land, we embraced this separation of identities and let you
provide both host credentials and user credentials to get a combined
identity that is what you present to the fileserver [1], which can then
apply whatever authorization policy it wishes (just defaulting to per-user
credentials may be simplest, and the system mostly works fine even in the
absence of host identity credentials).  I'm told that Auristor, Inc [2] has
done some interesting things in this space, but I hvae not explored it
myself out of IP considerations.

-Ben

[1] draft-wilkinson-afs-rxgk-afs is where this ended up
[2] https://www.auristor.com/