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Why not upgrade CVS? Subversion, GNU Arch, etc.
Why not upgrade CVS? Subversion, GNU Arch, etc.
Posted Jun 2, 2004 19:13 UTC (Wed) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029)In reply to: Why not upgrade CVS? Subversion, GNU Arch, etc. by piman
Parent article: Arch for CVS Users (Linux Journal)
That's why I'd like to see a more active project adopt the OpenCM approach of using SSL and identifying principals with public keys rather than passwords. Having authorized users specified as "Alice keys/alice.pubkey" and not requiring any further knowledge of Alice on the server would make life much easier for collaborations. Add SPKI/SDSI-type delegation and you could reduce the server-side access control to the public key of the repository owner (who might not even have an account on the machine), but this is probably overkill for a typical CM system.
This would be perfect for people who don't have root, and consequently can't add users, and run the server under their own UID. It would also be easier than giving people accounts, though you'd have to worry about the security of the CM software.
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Why not upgrade CVS? Subversion, GNU Arch, etc.
Posted Jun 2, 2004 23:21 UTC (Wed) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]
I'm no expert in PKI (or Apache), but I think Apache can already authenticate like that.I know that with Apache (or svnserve) you can easily let users define their own authorization schemes, which don't rely on local logins.
Why not upgrade CVS? Subversion, GNU Arch, etc.
Posted Jun 3, 2004 0:04 UTC (Thu) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link]
Apache certainly can, but that's kind of a heavyweight solution for a CM server. svnserve has a similar feature to pserver, except that passwords are never sent over the wire, but are used in a cryptographic hash. Unfortunately, the passwords are stored in cleartext. I just can't bring myself to use anything that stores cleartext passwords. Given how (relatively) easy OpenSSL is to use, it's surprising that there only seems to be one CM that takes advantage of it (not counting Subversion+Apache).Of course, the right thing to do would be to offer to help Subversion add SSL/TLS to the stand-alone server.