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Decoupling GPG from Git (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Over the last year I've been trying to understand why GPG isn't popular. Based on the features I think it's a pretty valid thing. This article changed my mind.

Turns out GPG is too old ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I like signing my commits, it feels good to know that my identity is actually attached to my code. So I put in some work to reconfigure git to use a different signing tool, I didn't think it would be such a big deal, turns out git fully intergrates GPG. I'm confused. Why does git need to be hardcoded to use GPG specifically?

What rule says we can't have git configs like:

[sigining]
  defaultMethod=minisign

[signing.minisign]
  always=true
  signCommand=minisign -S -s {secret-key-file} -x {sig-file-name} -m {target-file}
  verifyCommand=minisign -V -P {public-key-file} -m {target-file}

Where the verifyCommand exits 0 if the signature is good and 1 if not.

I'm open to hearing cons. These are some I can think of:

User's have to configure git with each signing and verifying program
Upstream security conserns from signing programs
Signing programs changing their interfaces

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The way the author just degrades using email at all isn't doing him any favours imo. Sometimes there are restrictions and certain technologies need to be used. Let's say that I need to use email but need someone to verify that it's me sending the email. PGP is an easy-ish way of doing that. It's trivial to make an SMTP server to send an email as anyone you want and have that email go through down filters. If it isn't signed though, which is much harder to forge, the other user knows I didn't send the email.

Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for PGP, I don't use PGP, I could care less if email disappears. I just think the bias is detrimental to the article

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's "bias" in favor of the truth, though. I don't think he's saying anything against email as a technology or against PGP-signing your emails as a habit -- just saying that encrypting an email with a PGP key and thinking that'll make it un-eavesdroppable is just 100% wrong backwards and forwards. That's accurate, and I think it's worth saying (I mean, I wasn't fully aware that e.g. the subject line of a PGP-encrypted email is still plaintext).