[p4] password encyrption

[Jeff Grills]

So, if I interpret what you're saying correctly, you're afraid of users
intentionally impersonating each other to the perforce server to do things
their own user account doesn't have access to do.  Is that correct?  Simply
making sure everyone has a strong password should be sufficient to deter
most people from doing such things.  Running a reasonably new server with
the security level
(http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.061/manuals/p4sag/03_superuser.html#10
81537) set to 2 or higher should do the trick for you.

You could consider using the IP address field of the perforce permissions
table to restrict the ability to promote files to higher levels of the
release cycle to a single machine, and then lock that machine down tight.
You would need to secure the physical machine from the employees in a server
room (assuming you have one), and then only allow access to that machine via
SSH (for unix systems) or Remote Desktop (for Windows machines), and both of
those remote access mechanisms have strong encryption on their data streams.

If you actually have a problem with users going as far out of their way as
to sniff network traffic to obtain passwords for other perforce users to
impersonate them - well, then you have a big problem.  I'd personally
consider employee reprimands, up to and including termination - you'll only
have to fire at most one person before the rest of the staff falls in line,
and I really don't think it will get that far.  If that's too heavy handed
for your taste, you could consider putting all your privileged employees on
a subnet such that the general staff can't sniff that traffic between them
and the perforce server because it's never transmitted on the wire connected
to their machine (even just a good network switch should do the trick
there).

I hope these ideas help you out...

j 

-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Adam Breashears
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 5:22 PM
To: Weintraub, David; perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: Re: [p4] password encyrption



Of particular concern here is who can move code between 'staging' areas for
different levels of the release cycle, and most importantly - production.

So source files in clear text isn't so much an issue (and changing our
internal culture on file submission would be a different battle) as to which
users can sync to where (since production points to a particular source).

The benefit to built in encryption is the 'Lowest Common Denominator' theory
of user behavior.  :)

Excellent links!