this is really a reply to an earlier message that I deleted.
the question was asked 'what would the security people like instead of
SSH'
as a security person who doesn't like how ssh is used for everything, let
me list a couple of concerns.
ssh is default allow (it lets you run any commands), you can lock it down
with effort.
ssh defaults to establishing a tunnel between machines that other network
traffic can use to bypass your system. yes I know that with enough effort
and control of both systems you can tunnel over anything, the point is
that ssh is eager to do this for you (overly eager IMHO)
ssh depends primarily on certificates that reside on untrusted machines.
it can be made to work with tokens or such, but it takes a fair bit of
effort.
sshd runs as root on just about every system
people trust ssh too much. they tend to think that anything is acceptable
if it's done over ssh (this isn't a technical issue, but it is a social
issue)
what would I like to see in an ideal world?
something that runs as the git user, does not enable tunneling, and only
does the data transfer functions needed for a push. it should use
off-the-shelf libraries for certificate authentication and tie into PAM
for additional authentication.
the authentication would not be any better than with SSH, but the rest
would be better. I was very pleased to watch the git-daemon development,
and the emphisis on it running with minimum privilages and provide just
the functionality that was needed, and appropriately assuming that any
connection from the outside is hostile until proven otherwise.
what would I do with current tools?
I would say that developers working from outside should VPN into the
company network before doing the push with SSH rather than exposing the
SSH daemon to the entire Internet.
in the medium term, if the git-over-http gets finished, I would like to
see a seperate cgi created to allow push as well. http is overused as a
tunneling protocol, but it's easy to setup a server that can't do anything
except what you want, so this tunneling is generally not a threat to
servers (it's a horrible threat to client systems)
David Lang
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