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What the hell? Are you defending a decision to keep keys unencrypted in a git repo?

by woah 11y ago

Xylakant 11y ago
yes, indeed I am. I'm all in favor of keeping the tools used to a level where the effort makes sense to protect the value of the goods. I totally could lock up my newrelic api key in a bank safe, double encrypted with two persons 4096 bit GPG keys, but that would be a little overkill, wouldn't it? Do you do that? I'd be moderately annoyed if somebody started pushing false metrics to my NR account, but that's about all the damage they could do with the information in that repo. So what level of effort would you propose?
- lox 11y ago
  Agreed, we do this as well at some scale. The vast majority of application configuration falls into this category. The advantage of storing them in a git repo (we use a different git repo to the main codebase) is that you can re-use the same access control mechanisms (note that is not the same as giving the same people access to the different repos) and you get strong change history.
geofft 11y ago
It's a perfectly defensible decision. The standard cryptographer's reply at this point would be, what is your threat model? If "A developer could have their GitHub account broken into" or "Someone could break into GitHub deeply enough that they could access private repos" are in your threat model, you shouldn't be using GitHub at all for anything, including code, because it would be straightforward to use that access to subvert your site in other ways. Which is to say, especially for small sites, that's not a useful threat model. If "You might do a git commit to remove them, then push the repo somewhere" is in your threat model, then the answer is just "Don't do that" (or more precisely, "Make sure everyone on the team understands that can't be done without precautions"). The easiest way to don't-do-that is to have them in a separate git repo from your code. But either way, as projects grow, there's going to be stuff in your git history you don't want to be public (like, oh, git commit -m "Implementing this stupid feature because this customer is stupid") because human error happens sometimes. So if you want to publish a previously-private codebase, the only robust approach is to copy all the files into a new non-git repo and make a new commit. And the other part of the cryptographer's reply is, where else are you going to store the secrets and what are its security properties?

What the hell? Are you defending a decision to keep keys unencrypted in a git repo?

by woah 11y ago

What the hell? Are you defending a decision to keep keys unencrypted in a git repo?

yes, indeed I am. I'm all in favor of keeping the tools used to a level where the effort makes sense to protect the value of the goods. I totally could lock up my newrelic api key in a bank safe, double encrypted with two persons 4096 bit GPG keys, but that would be a little overkill, wouldn't it? Do you do that? I'd be moderately annoyed if somebody started pushing false metrics to my NR account, but that's about all the damage they could do with the information in that repo. So what level of effort would you propose?

lox 11y ago
Agreed, we do this as well at some scale. The vast majority of application configuration falls into this category. The advantage of storing them in a git repo (we use a different git repo to the main codebase) is that you can re-use the same access control mechanisms (note that is not the same as giving the same people access to the different repos) and you get strong change history.

geofft 11y ago

It's a perfectly defensible decision. The standard cryptographer's reply at this point would be, what is your threat model? If "A developer could have their GitHub account broken into" or "Someone could break into GitHub deeply enough that they could access private repos" are in your threat model, you shouldn't be using GitHub at all for anything, including code, because it would be straightforward to use that access to subvert your site in other ways. Which is to say, especially for small sites, that's not a useful threat model. If "You might do a git commit to remove them, then push the repo somewhere" is in your threat model, then the answer is just "Don't do that" (or more precisely, "Make sure everyone on the team understands that can't be done without precautions"). The easiest way to don't-do-that is to have them in a separate git repo from your code. But either way, as projects grow, there's going to be stuff in your git history you don't want to be public (like, oh, git commit -m "Implementing this stupid feature because this customer is stupid") because human error happens sometimes. So if you want to publish a previously-private codebase, the only robust approach is to copy all the files into a new non-git repo and make a new commit. And the other part of the cryptographer's reply is, where else are you going to store the secrets and what are its security properties?