Enforcing Access Control in Distributed Version Control Systems

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 31 Jul 2026] Enforcing Access Control in Distributed Version Control Systems Xin Xu, Quanwei Cai, Jingqiang Lin, Shiran Pan, Liangqin Ren Version control systems (VCS), including central VCS (CVCS) and distributed VCS (DVCS), are widely adopted to manage the changes to various types of data. Unlike the CVCS where all the entities obtain the data from the server and the access control is enforced with the cooperation of the server, each entity in the DVCS stores the entire repository, obtains the repository shared by any entity and is free to share its own repository. Therefore, existing access control schemes for CVCS are not suitable for DVCS. In this paper, we present a distributed access control scheme (Disac) for DVCS. Disac makes each entity have full control over its data, while the access control is enforced at each entity independently. We adopt Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) and Attribute-based Signature (ABS) to achieve the read and write permission control. The analysis of the Git client demonstrates that Disac can be integrated easily. Comments: 6 pages, 2 figures. Author-accepted manuscript Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2608.00132 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.00132v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.00132 Focus to learn more Journal reference: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), pp. 772-777, 2019 Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICME.2019.00138 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Liangqin Ren [view email] [v1] Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:40:13 UTC (537 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)