bug#22883: Authenticating a Git checkout

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

So we sign Git commits, and now we want to authenticate Git checkouts.
There’s a series of bad news.

First, ‘git pull’ doesn’t do it for you, you have to pass ‘--verify’ and
there’s no way to set it globally.

Second, even if it did, it would be a shallow check: as Mike notes in
<https://mikegerwitz.com/papers/git-horror-story> with the ‘signchk’
script, you actually have to traverse the whole commit history and
authenticate them one by one.  But that’s OK, it runs in presumably less
than a minute on a repo the size of Guix’s, and we could also stop at
signed tags to avoid redundant checks.

Third, as I wrote before¹, relying on the OpenPGP web of trust to
determine whether a commit is “valid” is inappropriate: what we want to
know is whether a commit was made by an authorized person, not whether
it was made by someone who happens to have an OpenPGP key directly or
indirectly certified.  IOW, we want to know whether the key used to sign
the commit is among the authorized developer keys.

Fourth, there’s inversion of control: ‘git log’ & co. call out to ‘gpg’,
so if we want to do something different than just ‘gpg --verify’, we
have to put some other ‘gpg’ script in $PATH.  Blech.

Fifth, even if we did that, we’d be stuck parsing the possibly l10n’d
output of ‘gpg’.  Pretty fragile.

Sixth, OK, we’ll use libgit2, and write Guile bindings, maybe based on
the CHICKEN bindings², easy!  Well no, it turns out that libgit2³ has no
support for signed commits (the ‘signature’ abstraction there has
nothing to do with OpenPGP signatures.)

Seventh, even if it did, what would we do with the raw ASCII-armored
OpenPGP signature?  GPG and GPGME are waaaay too high-level, so we’d
need to implement OpenPGP (in Guile, maybe based on the OpenPGP library
in Bigloo?)?!


I hope I’m just being negative and I missed an obvious solution or made
wrong hypotheses.  Please tell me!  :-)


I stumbled upon git-lockup⁴, which uses something other than OpenPGP to
sign objects in Git.  However, signatures are not stored in commits but
rather in “git notes”, which, IIUC, are mutable objects detached from
the rest of the object store, so not great.

Cheers,
Ludo’.

¹ http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=22883#40
² http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/git
³ https://libgit2.github.com/libgit2/
⁴ https://github.com/warner/git-lockup

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