Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Keybase launches encrypted Git

keybase.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 277 posts

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#71

Post by WorldMaker »

malgorithms wrote: post #2

Keybase team member here. Interesting fact: git doesn't check the validity of sha-1 hashes in your commit history. Meaning if someone compromises your hosted origin, they can quietly compromise your history. So even the fears about data leaks aside, this is a big win for safety. From an entrepreneurial perspective, this is my favorite thing we've done at Keybase. It pushes all the buttons: (1) it's relatively simple,…

How likely/easy would it be to add "know nothing" mirrors of these encrypted repositories? Say that I trust the keybase app (or something that speaks its protocols) possibly indefinitely, but maybe I'm not keen on a single cloud storage backend and want additional secure backup options. (Maybe I'm even unconvinced about the long term guarantee of keybase's storage space offerings due to possibly changing cost/business model factors, as others have pointed out here.)

It would be nice if I could have an encrypted copy in S3 or Dropbox or somewhere, that presumably maybe git couldn't directly make use of, and would be encrypted and those services couldn't touch either, but that the app could still push/pull changes to.

Certainly, I'd still have an unencrypted view of the contents in any local clones of the repository I may have in the case that I couldn't access keybase storage, but it still seems like there may be useful cases where an encrypted backup is somewhere else in the cloud as well, as a safe failover just in case.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#73

Post by EGreg »

zeroxfe wrote: post #6

I'm really happy about this. I have private repos for personal information (e.g., tax spreadsheets going back a decade) that I keep synchronized across machines, and have to jump through hoops to get an encrypted authoritative remote source. Right now I do that with an encrypted partition on a private VM. And, it really sucks that GitHub does not encrypt data at rest: --- SNIP from https://help.github.com/articles/gi…

Wait, I think they are saying their backend integration such as forking through the web interface etc. would not work unless they decrypted your repo. Which makes sense - you should be using client software for all this!

Why don't more people use gitlab btw?

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#74

Post by rocmcd »

eslaught wrote: post #68
zeroxfe wrote: post #6

I'm really happy about this. I have private repos for personal information (e.g., tax spreadsheets going back a decade) that I keep synchronized across machines, and have to jump through hoops to get an encrypted authoritative remote source. Right now I do that with an encrypted partition on a private VM. And, it really sucks that GitHub does not encrypt data at rest: --- SNIP from https://help.github.com/articles/gi…

It certainly depends on the threat model, but in this case I have to agree with Github---adding at-rest encryption would be unlikely to make their product significantly more secure, and it would certainly be nowhere as secure as Keybase. With Keybase, the data is encrypted on the client, and the keys stay on the client. Assuming the crypto is done right, there is fundamentally no way for Keybase to read the data, and…

Exactly.

The only thing that at-rest encryption would prevent is someone walking into a datacenter (or wherever the drives are physically stored) and nabbing one. An attacker is much more likely to gain access to a live system, where the data would be readily accessible.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#75

Post by gwenzek »

I don't really understand how it works. Are the git objects encrypted before being pushed? In that case how are they handled by the server? Does it accept them even though they make no sense? What Github is going to show?

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#76

Post by therealmarv »

If you go crypto don't use git. It's not designed for cryptography in mind and the Keybase approach looks nice IF I can control every chain or can keep using github (or any other git server) with it. But for the storing part alone I would not trust Keybase. I would even say if you do crypto and need cloud storage then store it in multiple places and avoid git. Better flat file and some daily backup strategy with e.g. encfs as the bottom layer. In worst case you get your data back.

Sorry keybase.... you are not a trustable cloud storage for me.

It feels like betting on your company... I want to bet on your company without feeling dependent on worst case restore scenarios (computer dying while your company dies).

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#77

Post by pkd »

ericfrederich wrote: post #17

This removes the ability for collaborating, browsing online, basically any feature of GitLab/GitHub/BitBucket. ... I think I'm in favor of this. I think of the things that those services provide on top of Git should actually be ported or mapped to Git itself. Branches, pull requests, comments, etc... should all be Git objects of some sort.

Somebody else said branches were already native to git. So are pull requests. Comments and issues are unlikely to be made native to git ever since git is developed primarily for the Linux kernel and their discussion channel is the mailing list.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#78

Post by simonbyrne »

azag0 wrote: post #53
u801e wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting fact: git doesn't check the validity of sha-1 hashes in your commit history. Isn't the commit sha1 determined, in part, by the sha1 values of the tree it refers to as well as the sha1 of the parent commit? If you fetch a branch from a compromised remote, all the sha1 values of the commits that were compromised would be different.

Correct, but git doesn't recompute the hashes locally, so it wouldn't know they are wrong.

It doesn't seem to verify hashes of objects on checkout, but it does when receiving packfiles. So it's difficult to see how this could be an exploit unless the attacker has access to your local .git directory.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#79

Post by pkd »

paule89 wrote: post #72

just to clarify: 1. Do you need a private git repository? 2. Is everything really encrypted? 3. If everything is encrypted how can i access it through Git Desktop?

From what I understood (I haven't actually used the product), the repository is in the decrypted state on your local machine and is fully encrypted while being stored on the remote.
Post reply on HN