Digital signatures and SVN ?

[Erik Anderson <er...@teamworkgroup.com>]

Has there been any thought to how digital signatures interact with SVN?  
As far as I have been able to find out signatures are only being used in 
authentication, I assume in conjunction with SSL/TLS/apache.  I would 
also like to know if signing the contents of files or a changeset has 
been considered at all?

Signing the files could be done with a versioned property and a special 
client that verifies the signature of files that are checked 
out/updated.  However the contents of the file could be "replayed" along 
with the signature, thus being able to authorize a file to change to any 
other file/revision on the system...

Signing changesets could be done with nonversioned properties.  This 
would guarantee that all the transitions were authorized, but the 
contents of a changeset are not available to the normal user (at least 
not without svnadmin dump), and if an unsigned commit were made there is 
some question as to what the signatures mean in future changesets.

And in case anyone is wondering why the heck I am asking these kinds of 
questions: I am trying to think of ways in which Subversion could be 
used in a kind of change management system.  I'm hoping that by 
digitally signing any changes that I can protect against unauthorized 
changes to the server (or even replacing the server).  Probably a bit 
overboard and probably overlooking other obvious security issues...

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Re: Digital signatures and SVN ?

[Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>]

On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 02:24, Erik Anderson wrote:

> Signing changesets could be done with nonversioned properties.

There's been bits of discussion here and there among svn developers,
nothing specifically designed or planned, however.

A few of us have talked about something similar to what you're saying...
attaching a revision prop to each revision which is a signed checksum of
the changeset 'diff' represented by the revision ('svn diff -r N-1:N').

Just water-cooler talk, though.  :-)



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