1 SECURITY OF MERCURIAL-SERVER

     2 

     3 mercurial-server relies entirely on sshd to grant access to remote users. As a

     4 result, it runs no daemons, installs no setuid programs, and no part of it

     5 runs as root except the install process: all programs run as the user hg. And

     6 any attack on mercurial-server can only be started if the Bad Guys already

     7 have a public key in ~hg/.ssh/authorized_keys, otherwise sshd will bar the

     8 way. No matter what command the user tries to run on the remote system via

     9 ssh, mercurial-server is run. 

    10 

    11 It parses the command line the user asked for, and interprets and runs the

    12 corresponding hg operation itself if access is allowed, so users can only read

    13 and add to history within repositories; they cannot run any other hg command.

    14 In addition, every push and pull is logged with a datestamp, changeset ID and

    15 the key that performed the operation.

    16 

    17 However, while the first paragraph holds no matter what bugs mercurial-server

    18 contains, the second depends on the relevant code being correct; though the

    19 entire codebase is currently only about twice as long as this README,

    20 mercurial-server is a fairly new program and may harbour bugs. Backups are

    21 essential!