Re: CVS, RSH and direct access to repository

[Mark D. Baushke]

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Claus Henriksen <address@hidden> writes:

> Well, what then if you tunnel pserver like explained in 
> http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~klaren/index.html?left.html&cvs-stunnel.html ?
> Has somone experience with that? 
> I got it up working alright, but I have got no true long-time experience.

The link does show you how to send your passwords and data to/from the
server more securely which would reduce the possibility of someone
snooping your password out of the tcp connection itself or of getting
ahold of your files without needing to go to a bit more trouble.

However, under the :pserver: method, the password is kept trivially
encoded both on your desktop (in $HOME/.cvspass) and on the server (in
CVSROOT/passwd). Also, the cvs application will still be running as
'root' for a short time to listen to new connecitons before switching to
the appropriate user doing the commit. I am not willing to make any
claims that cvs is 'secure' from a local root exploit. There have been
such in the past and could be more in the future as cvs was not designed
originally with much security in mind.

It all comes down to what kind of security is good enough to mitigate
the risks to your source base. Everyone needs to make their own risk
assessment when choosing the source control system they are going to
use and how they are going to configure it will also impact how secure
the data being kept really is.

        Good luck,
        -- Mark
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