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
I am no cryptographer, but I understand that in the SSH protocol, the keys are only used for signing anyway: that is, the user is authenticated by saying “I want to authenticate with some key, and here’s some data signed by this key”, and this is completely separate to encryption. It also seems that GitHub encourages using separate keys for commit signing and general SSH access, which might alleviate some of the ickyness.
You are really not wrong though, I feel like people only started using SSH for this because it kinda worked and they already have been familiar with it.