Access-controlled workspaces (invite-only)

[earthstar-project]

Access-controlled workspaces (invite-only)

[sgwilym]

I'm going to implement this. As mentioned above, one of the problems to solve is distinguishing when a share address contains a public key and when it doesn't.

Some options:

1. As mentioned above, we could just use the rough heuristic of 'begins with a b and is 53 characters long'. If these criteria are satisfied, then a share's private key is required to write valid documents.

2. We could also make invite-only shares use a different address format, e.g. - or ++ instead of +. This has the benefit of making it easy for a user to eyeball if a share is an invite-only share as well.

3. One last option is to make all shares have a public key, and dropping the possibility of writing to a share with only the share address altogether. This makes Earthstar a little more secure by default, but I wonder if this introduces unnecessary complexity for many use-cases.

[johanbove]

How much time do we have to contemplate on these options? At first thought I would go for option 2 and use "-" to indicate the read-only mode.

[sgwilym]

@johanbove I have a branch which implements option 3 but I'm not totally happy with it.

One reason is that signing / verification of docs takes twice as long as there are now two signatures. This effectively doubles the time taken to perform common operations like ingesting docs from another peer.