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Re: Changeset Signing

From: Mark Phippard <markphip_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2015 15:58:25 -0400

That link should be:

http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/notes/changeset-signing.txt

And you should presumably be working off trunk as well.

Mark

On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 3:56 PM, Ruchir Arya <ruchirarya_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Brane,
>
> Since last few days i am going through the document to implement changeset
> signing. The link is given below:
>
> http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/branches/master-passphrase/notes/changeset-signing.txt
> In this document, i don't understand what is the meaning of the statement
> given below.
> "the client could silently retry the txn-commit if HEAD changed from the
> time when the commit txn was created."
> How can a client silently retry the transaction-commit or zombie
> transaction? Which command can be used to do that?
> Additionally, can changeset signing be applied to SVN the way it has been
> proposed in this document?
>
> Thanks,
> -Ruchir Arya
>
> On Monday, June 8, 2015 at 4:11:27 AM UTC-4, Branko Čibej wrote:
>>
>> On 08.06.2015 04:19, Ruchir Arya wrote:
>> > Hello everybody,
>> >
>> > I am new to SVN development. I have a question. Why is there no
>> > implementation of changeset signing in subversion? Suppose if the
>> > root/admin (who maintains repository) is not trustworthy,
>>
>> If your server administrator is not trustworthy, then no amount of
>> signing is going to help. Anyone with direct access to the repository
>> storage (which a server admin will have) can modify revision contents
>> even if they're signed; no cryptographic signature is proof against
>> attack.
>>
>> > then there is a problem. Is there any future possibility to implement
>> > digital signing of changeset to achieve integrity and non repudiation?
>> > My focus is to implement some of the security related features in svn.
>>
>> Subversion's repository backend already goes a good way towards ensuring
>> integrity: the client provides cryptographic hashes of all committed
>> data and the server checks them before committing, and the reverse
>> happens during checkout/update. The server also stores hashes for
>> certain metadata (although not all; there's room for improvement here).
>>
>> Non-repudiation is a lot harder to achieve because it's not enough to
>> control the server, you also have to prove that every client making
>> commits is free from malicious software that could be inserting
>> backdoors at the source of the commit.
>>
>> -- Brane
>>
>>

-- 
Thanks
Mark Phippard
http://markphip.blogspot.com/
Received on 2015-08-03 21:58:40 CEST

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