Password "cache" as in SUDO

[Daniel Sahlberg]

Hi,

I'd like to float an idea for discussion.

We are administering a lot of different servers and using Subversion/TortoiseSVN to manage some customisation files. We are using a shared admin account on each server, every user has their own account at the Subversion server.

We want to keep track of who makes a commit so I have set AllowAuthSave to false to avoid anyone accidentally saving their credentials.

When we make changes, we often have to commit (or update) several different folders in a row (within a short period of time), entering the credentials every time.

I've been toying with the idea of a "sudo-like" credential cache where the credentials are saved for a certain time, for example 30 minutes. If they are needed within this period of time, they are reused, otherwise they are flushed. Ideally they should also be flushed whenever the session is logged out.

I'm not so worried about the security implications about saving credentials: If someone has enough credentials to read data from memory, they can also snoop the password when entered on the keyboard. Of course this feature should configurable (maybe even disabled by default).

I couldn't find that this has been discussed before. It this a feature that could be considered? I might be able to look at it during the holidays, but I would like to check that it doesn't go against the design philosophy of TSVN.

Kind regards,

Daniel

[Stefan]

not sure how this would work in a secure manner:

to store the info over a period of time, you'll need a separate process. And since that process has no access to the tortoiseproc process who does the authentication, you'd have to implement some inter-process communication between the cache process and tortoiseproc.

But of course if you want to implement something like this then go ahead!