RE: Security, audits and pserver

[Walter, Jan]

That's why you would tunnel it over ssh or something like that, with limited
key access. People you trust get the key, and their key gets kept on the
server. Definitely, a wide-open pserver connection is just an invitation to
get cracked.

Jan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: Monday, December 16, 2002 5:13 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Security, audits and pserver
> 
> 
> Walter, Jan writes:
> > 
> > Personally I tend to believe that giving people any sort of local 
> > access (even in a chrooted environment for the user for 
> instance) is 
> > more of a security risk than allowing pserver access over ssl/ssh, 
> > with the limited number of users having the key needed to connect 
> > (i.e. Auto-key negotiation disabled and so on). This limits the 
> > exposure of pserver to people already having the public key of the 
> > server (and their public key registered there).
> 
> Note that giving anyone pserver access to a machine is 
> equivalent to giving them local shell access -- there are 
> fairly simple tricks that can be used to execute arbitrary 
> code on the server.  CVS was not designed as a security 
> application, it was designed as a collaboration application 
> for cooperative users.
> 
> -Larry Jones
> 
> Let's just sit here a moment... and savor the impending 
> terror. -- Calvin
>