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Unsigned Commits

https://blog.glyph.im/2024/01/unsigned-commits.html

I’m not going to cryptographically sign my git commits, and you shouldn’t either.

I'm curious to hear what the Lemmy programming community thinks of this!

The author argues against signing Git commits, stating that it adds unnecessary complexity to systems.
The author believes that signing commits perpetuates an engineering culture of blindly adopting complex tools.
The consequences of signing Git commits are likely to be subtle and not as dramatic as some may believe.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/vjDeK

25 comments

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loakang

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Unless they have access to your private key then there's no way they can sign code as you.

Alternatively yes, access to your password (and 2fa) would allow them the ability to add an ssh private key for you.

But that's irrelevant because the issue at hand is that I can make a commit to a repo that I have access to, but using your username, and there's no way to verify it wasn't you (actually there is but it requires some assumptions and is also dependent on the git hosting infrastructure)

However when you use signing, key 'A' may be able to access a repo but can't sign commits as key 'B', so you can't have the blame dropped on you for malicious commits (again, unless they also compromised your account/key)

hallettj

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For some more detail see https://dev.to/martiliones/how-i-got-linus-torvalds-in-my-contributors-on-github-3k4g