A storage-efficient cryptography-based access control solution for subversion

Abstract

Version control systems are widely used in software development and document management. Unfortunately, versioning confidential files is not normally supported: Existing solutions encrypt the transport channel, but store data in plaintext within a repository. We come up with an access control solution that allows secure versioning of confidential files even in the presence of a malicious server administrator. Using convergent encryption as a building block, we enable space-efficient storage of version histories despite secure encryption. We describe an implementation of our concept for the Subversion (SVN) system, and evaluate storage efficiency and runtime of this implementation. Our implementation is compatible with existing SVN versions without requiring changes to the storage backend.