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Re: Bug? FSFS revision control

From: Sean Laurent <sean_at_neuronfarm.com>
Date: 2005-01-26 23:34:30 CET

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On Wednesday 26 January 2005 04:10 pm, Dassi, Nasser wrote:
> > > There are several ways; and giving up so easily is extremely *bad*
> > > practice. Making a hacker think a few minutes is better than just
> > > giving them the answer without a blink.
> >
> > 1) The best way to do that is to secure the server itself.
> >
> > 2) Security through obfuscation does not work.
>
> Security through negligence works less than through obfuscation.
>
> Ironically, negligence carries a greater legal penalty than
> obfuscation!!!

I guess I'm just not seeing how modifying the FSFS backend would actually
help.

Let's assume an malicious user gains unauthorized access to a server. Perhaps
the exploited a security hole that allowed them to run a script as an
arbitrary user. Perhaps they cracked a user's password or worse yet, the
root password. It doesn't really matter.

If the hacker has write access to the Subversion repository and they want to
cause harm, why would they bother to edit the revision history? As Toby
Johnson already pointed out, if a user has write access to the repository,
they could destroy the entire repository!

The best way to prevent this is to use the existing OS access controls, secure
the repository directories and restrict access to them. Why add a level of
complexity to Subversion that won't help solve the problem?

- -Sean
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Received on Wed Jan 26 23:37:11 2005

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