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Re: Authentication - storing of passwords in ~/.subversion/auth/svn.simple

From: Roland Schwingel <Roland.Schwingel_at_onevision.de>
Date: 2003-09-19 11:26:37 CEST

Hi David and List....

> Which mechanism of 'encryption' would you suggest? rot13? base64
encoding?
Well an encryption which at its best can only be read by svn client to
decode it back in clear to send it to apache. I know that someone capable
enough to program can extract the algorithm out of the sources and decrypt
the password by then. The 'encryption' should be strong enough to hide the
real password from human eyes by just opening a file in the editor,
especially when your authentication mechanism you use in apache reads users
data from a global authentification mechanism where you only have one
unique password for everything. If it is detectable by just knowing where
to find a single file the whole security is gone.

> My suggestion is to rely on filesystem-level security to protect the
> password files. If you want to defend against really stupid attackers
> who don't know how to do google searches, promote base64 - this is what
> the vast majority of 'encrypted' passwords for network-enabled apps are,
> because they still have to 'decrypt' to plaintext. If you cannot rely on
> filesystem-level security, don't store passwords to disk.
In my eyes you cannot rely on that... Eg (like here) you have a linux box
with the users homeaccounts and samba to share the filesystem to the
clients and you use subversion on cygwin you are running very fast in
exactly this situation. The auth and/or .subversion folder and their
contents created by svn have 755 permissions on the linux box, so everyone
can read them (This is a cygwin<->samba problem). You need to chmod at
least the auth folder from the linux machine to protect the password.
But even you imagine the fs level security is working, this will not
"defend" a user who has root-access to the machine. He can read the file
regardlessly of the permissions and so can get the cleartext password,
which is elsewise completely hidden to him. When it is encrpyted in some
way the burden to him to get it cleartext is much higher. I still suggest
to encrypt the stored passwords, even I can understand your (David) points.

> (Sorry if this came off as a rant, this same thread has come up three
> times now this week on different mailing lists I subscribe to. Believe
> it or not, I edited this post down... twice.)
Ooops.. I just browsed very fast over the subversion users mailinglist and
couldn't find an appropriate thread. Didn't want to hit a wound point.

Roland, who is not wanting to start an ideologic war here, just noticing a
(in my eyes) security design flaw.

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Received on Fri Sep 19 11:27:39 2003

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