Towards secure multi-sited transactional revision control systems

Version control systems play a very important role in maintaining the revision history of software and facilitating software evolution. As the software development process is gradually taking the form of a collaborative effort among several teams hosted over widely dispersed sites, centralized version control systems are gradually giving way to multi-sited version control systems. Ensuring the integrity and consistency of versioned objects in a environment that supports concurrent access, is a difficult problem. The problem is further aggravated by the need to ensure confidentiality of versioned data as well as non-repudiability of origin. In this paper, we identify the security deficiencies of current revision control systems and propose a model for secure multi-sited version control. Then we develop a transaction management system for revision control based on the new secure multi-sited version control system model.