Re: RFC: Encrypting ~/.subversion/auth on Windows

On Nov 12, 2004, at 2:14 PM, kfogel@collab.net wrote:
>
>
> Is this encryption based on the user's password or something?
>
>

My question is: what problem are we trying to solve?

Through repeated discussions with users, my impression is that the
problem is that an administrator (or perhaps someone sitting with you
at your terminal) can accidentally glance at a cleartext password.

CVS solves this particular problem by doing a trivial rot-13-esque
scrambling on the contents of .cvspass. Not real crypto, just enough
to prevent accidental glances. Couldn't we do something like that? It
would be simple It would be portable -- not requiring any OS-specific
code.

Somebody could do it as bite-sized task:

    * add a couple of scramble/descramble functions to libsvn_subr.

    * make the client-side auth cache use them. (the auth-cache files
are just hashtables on disk; add a hash-key that describes the
scramble method used.)

    * make the svnserve user-db file use them (and add a config variable
to svnserve.conf that describes the scramble method).

Seems pretty easy, and users ask about this problem all the time. I'd
much rather see this done, rather than adding more "#ifdef win32"
things to our code.

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Received on Fri Nov 12 23:40:52 2004