[
http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-4626?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=217075#action_217075
]
Brian Fox commented on MNG-4626:
--------------------------------
Maven was built assuming no intelligence on the repository side, so it exactly
follows the http standards wrt authentication. Simply encrypting the password
is a false sense of security, if you really have sensitive data, you should
instead be using https to encrypt the whole transfer. The encryption built into
Maven 2.1 was intended to provide a way to give some security to your password
by obscuring it from the settings.xml. Naturally to conform to http standards,
we needed to reverse the encryption before putting in on the wire.
There may be some consideration done to define a new repository manager
protocol and some password encryption around that, but for the moment, this
seems to be out of scope for Maven itself.
That said, we have developed this functionality in Nexus Pro, but never shipped
it because of some incompatibilities with the sun http provider in some edge
cases. It sort of fell off the priority list, but we will be resurrecting and
polishing this up soon.
> Avoid cleartext passwords over http
> -----------------------------------
>
> Key: MNG-4626
> URL: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-4626
> Project: Maven 2 & 3
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: General
> Affects Versions: 3.0-alpha-7
> Reporter: Brendan Lawlor
>
> The current encryption scheme implemented by Maven avoids the use of
> cleartext passwords on local files by allowing them to be encrypted locally
> and decrypted just before the maven client requests from or deploys to a
> central artifact repository.
> I would like to suggest that the Maven team replicate the idea adopted by
> Artifactory, where passwords are _transmitted_ encrypted, and only decrypted
> on the server side by the repository. Requests and deployments are made over
> http and transmitted in the clear. Where the passwords are system passwords
> integrated to Active Directory or similar using LDAP, this is not an option
> even within a company's LAN. I like the idea of where Nexus and the Maven
> development stack in general is going (I listened to Jason's seminar recently
> and I'm keen on much of where you are going). But passwords in the clear over
> http is a showstopper and I'm surprised you haven't already borrowed this
> idea from the competition.
> Another irritating side effect of maven's insistence in using cleartext
> passwords has been mentioned by a colleague of mine in MNG-4611. We currently
> use Artifactory for EXACTLY this reason (the password encryption) and maven
> logs loudly about the fact that the passwords are encrypted.
--
This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
-
If you think it was sent incorrectly contact one of the administrators:
http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/Administrators.jspa
-
For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
