search

AGWA / git-crypt

Transparent file encryption in git
https://www.agwa.name/projects/git-crypt/
GNU General Public License v3.0
8.11k stars 472 forks source link

Questions about number of files and bytes #214

Closed impredicative closed 3 years ago

impredicative commented 3 years ago

As such, git-crypt is not the best tool for encrypting most or all of the files in a repository.

For a given repo, how many files and how many bytes would git-crypt scale to? What would be too many?

AGWA commented 3 years ago

It's not a matter of performance, but rather usability. git-crypt's approach of using Git filters imposes a rather high usability tax. It's not possible to give a precise number for when the usability tax becomes too high, but the use cases I envisioned had <10% of the files in a repo be encrypted. Perhaps others can chime in if they're using git-crypt with a greater proportion of encrypted files, but to be honest I am really skeptical git-crypt is the best tool for the job if that's your use case.

impredicative commented 3 years ago

What is the specific usability cost or blocker preventing use >10% or approaching 100%?

AGWA commented 3 years ago

gitattributes files are finicky and hard to get right. There is currently no merge driver (this could be fixed but the PRs so far have bugs) so git-crypt can't handle merge conflicts of encrypted files. There are probably other annoyances. Based on bugs filed over the years, people appear to have more trouble the farther they stray from git-crypt's intended use case.

I should also mention the security cost - as explained in the README, filenames, file sizes, and commit messages are not encrypted. This is unavoidable if you want the repo to be public except for a handful of files. Once you reach 100% encrypted, this is a pointless cost to pay.

impredicative commented 3 years ago

Noted. I looked at git-remote-gcrypt, but it doesn't seem like a good option if it'll always upload everything at each push, as I think it does. That won't scale at all.

In addition to git-crypt, I will also consider a simple user-space encrypted filesystem which I can check-in to git.