doc/security
author Paul Crowley <paul@lshift.net>
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:05:39 +0100
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Beef up the caution
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SECURITY OF MERCURIAL-SERVER
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mercurial-server relies entirely on sshd to grant access to remote users.
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As a result, it runs no daemons, installs no setuid programs, and no part
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of it runs as root except the install process: all programs run as the user
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hg. And any attack on mercurial-server can only be started if the Bad Guys
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already have a public key in ~hg/.ssh/authorized_keys, otherwise sshd will
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bar the way.
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No matter what command the user tries to run on the remote system via ssh,
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mercurial-server is run. It parses the command line the user asked for, and
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interprets and runs the corresponding hg operation itself if access is
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allowed, so users can only read and add to history within repositories;
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they cannot run any other hg command. In addition, every push and pull is
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logged with a datestamp, changeset ID and the key that performed the
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operation.
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However, while the first paragraph holds no matter what bugs
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mercurial-server contains, the second depends on the relevant code being
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correct; though the entire codebase is short, mercurial-server is a fairly
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new program and may harbour bugs. Backups are essential!