I was wondering if there was a way to make shared encryption more secure.  Here is my suggestion:  
The shared repository is encrypted using a key for the whole repository, just the way normal encryption would work.  
The server additionally keeps a copy of every user's public key.  
When a user is authorized, their repository is initialized and they receive the common key, encrypted by their public key.  
The only issue would be storage of the common key, which would have to be restricted to repository on a trusted machine.  

Not sure if this would be easy for you to implement, but I figured I'd submit a post detailing it, to see if maybe it was doable.
