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Keybase launches encrypted Git

keybase.io

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Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#241

Post by fragmede »

hannob wrote: post #64
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,…

> Keybase team member here. Interesting fact: git doesn't check the validity of sha-1 hashes in your commit history. I heard this a couple of times and tried to confirm it a while ago, but was unable to. I wasn't able to forge a repository with faulty hashes in it. I also heard plenty of people tell me that there exist public repositories with wrong hashes in them, but when I asked them they never could come up with…

> 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.

That second part of the fuller quote makes the first part irrelevant.

Git, sans GPG, does no validation of the given username and email - it is trivial to configure my laptop to stamp commits with hannob@ instead fragmede. All I need to do to frame hannob, then, is write access to a repo that they contribute to.

In the centralized world of github, that's a little bit more tricky, but at larger organizations where large groups (eg, all of eng) simply have write access to the repo(s), if git blame says hannob wrote the commit that stole passwords/money/etc, guess who's getting fired?

With GPG, I'm able to configure git so that commits that actually come from me have a GPG-validated signature. Snarkily, the blog post claims "no one" does this but I do. Given that this feature is known to be infrequently used, I'd believe it if git would accept commits with a bad signature.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#243

Post by lsiebert »

hannob wrote: post #228
lsiebert wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be wrong, but here's my current understanding. I believe Git CAN check the validity of sha1 hashes (I read the source a few years ago and have a very tiny git commit) using git fsck, which I believe kernel.org does nightly. It just doesn't do so automatically with every commit or whatever. But you can set up a test in your server, I believe, if that's important to you, either watching the files, or checking pus…

Sorry, you're confusing issues with a completely unrelated issue (SHA1 collissions). I haven't asked about that.

My apologies if I misunderstood. What did you mean by faulty hashes then?

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#245

Post by tanderson92 »

j7ake wrote: post #221
jredmond wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends - is that data encrypted on your system? Since git is decentralized, there's a chance that any plain-text copy (such as a clone on your system) could be compromised. Keybase even addresses this in the FAQ, to an extent: > What if my computer is compromised? > Your work is only as safe as your endpoints, so we can't help you there. This applies regardless of host or protocol, BTW, and it isn't even specif…

Hi pass uses gpg encryption on the text files my only concern are the file names which can leak meta info, for example just searching GitHub https://github.com/zurchpet/pass shows this person has passwords in a public repository but encrypted. Nevertheless I can see that the file names are credit card info and other sensitive info. It's like having a safe with a label "important stuff inside" ! Does keybase solve thi…

Yes, the contents of the git repository holding your pass files are encrypted, meaning that the file names are not visible to anyone without the private key (you).

You may also want to look at https://github.com/roddhjav/pass-tomb

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#246

Post by ValentineC »

From the article:

>> What are the limits?

> You can have as many repositories as you want, but the total for your personal repositories can't exceed 100GB. Each team also gets 100GB.

Is there anything stopping people from creating team after team just to hoard data in Keybase?

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#247

Post by aey »

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,…

It looks like you guys use react for a lot of your development. How do I know that you won’t push compromised code behind the scenes? Even unknowingly.

Btw your product is awesome! Multi platform encrypted team chat that doesn’t even need 4gb of ram :)

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#248

Post by mlindner »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #175
mlindner wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell would you do that. That defeats the point of git.

No it doesn't. I have many of my git repos in Dropbox but I'm not using Dropbox for sharing. Having those in Dropbox means I get automatic backup and that they are available when I switch to a different computer, which I do, but not frequently. As only I use my Dropbox account, I'm aware of the potential sync problem, but it's never been a problem. I do run fsck & gc more frequently than most, but I probably don't ne…

If you're doing this then there's no reason to use git. Just sync a raw directory.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#249

Post by beaner »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #225
malgorithms wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We believe the right long-term answer for Keybase is finding a way to charge large corporations and offer pretty much everything else for free. Obviously there would have to be some paid tier if you really wanted 10TB of storage or something, but very few people want that right now. We're still just getting started. Of course to achieve our goal, we'll also have to find a way to distinguish communities - which we'll…

The enterprise would be a valid target, but if you really want them to trust you, you'll need to offer localized hosting (host from EU, Russian, Chinese datacenters) as well as on-premise hosting. Actually, in that last one you should probably also offer consultancy to set up the servers securely - both software and physical hardware security. Secure software isn't worth much if the systems it runs on is compromised.…

If you're going to host locally doesn't it matter much less that it's encrypted? You could just use github enterprise.

Re: Keybase launches encrypted Git

#250

Post by tatersolid »

lsiebert wrote: post #161
hannob wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keybase team member here. Interesting fact: git doesn't check the validity of sha-1 hashes in your commit history. I heard this a couple of times and tried to confirm it a while ago, but was unable to. I wasn't able to forge a repository with faulty hashes in it. I also heard plenty of people tell me that there exist public repositories with wrong hashes in them, but when I asked them they never could come up with…

I may be wrong, but here's my current understanding. I believe Git CAN check the validity of sha1 hashes (I read the source a few years ago and have a very tiny git commit) using git fsck, which I believe kernel.org does nightly. It just doesn't do so automatically with every commit or whatever. But you can set up a test in your server, I believe, if that's important to you, either watching the files, or checking pus…

SHA2-256 has had hardware acceleration instructions on Intel since the Skylake series and on AMD since Ryzen; even ARM has has SHA2-256 acceleration for a while. Software support is the issue at this point.
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