How to safeguard my code

Question

I had posted my question in the below link on how to protect my code using Hg

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/173875/how-do-you-protect-code-from-leaking-outside

The question is:

In a DVCS scenario how can we restrict the code leakages? Is there any way technically to restrict this like when I move our of my work automatically history of codes should not be viewed?

Answer 1

The more programmers need to work on the code, the greater their need for collaborating and having networked access to the code. You'll have to define what the threat model is: what are you trying to protect against, in such a way that you define legitimate and illegitimate access.

Answer 2

In general the source code is just a bunch of text files. Whoever has access to them, can ,,steal'' or ,,pirate'' them, regardless of whether they are stored in CVS, git, Subversion, Mercurial, Windows shared folder, etc.

Distributed version control systems make it easy to grab a copy of all the history, but a hypothetical disgruntled employee can grab complete history from CVS server too. Or from backup tapes, or by manually copying the files over the years.

The only thing you can do is to limit copying all the data in your organization.

• iPods
• removable USB hard drives
• upload to untrusted web sites on the public Internet
• SCP/FTP access to servers outside your company

I wouldn't worry all that much, unless your work really needs to be super-secret (think military and such). If you treat your employees right, they will have no reason to hurt your organization.