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Re: The enduring popularity of git-credential-store

From
M Hickford <mirth.hickford@gmail.com>
Date
Nov 12, 2022, 02:30 UTC
Message-ID
<CAGJzqskHSn973AaXLV3btAZistH0jH87JJbG1CabbDnLJBkRzA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To
<Y2rdw7RD8mGTF40w@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>

On Tue, 8 Nov 2022 at 22:52, brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines
>
> On 2022-11-08 at 10:50:33, M Hickford wrote:
> > Among StackOverflow users [1], git-credential-store appears several
> > times more popular than any other credential helper. Does this make
> > anyone else uneasy? The docs warn that git-credential-store "stores
> > your passwords unencrypted on disk" [2]. Are users sacrificing
> > security for convenience?
>
> I definitely think there are better approaches.  However, none of the
> credential managers for the three major platforms work without a
> desktop environment, so if someone's logging in over SSH, then there's
> no more secure option that's going to work for them.  Taylor did
> mention GCM, but I believe it has the same problem, and even if it
> didn't, it's written in C#, which isn't portable to many Unices and
> isn't viable on servers anyway due to dependencies.

On my headless Raspberry Pi, I use OAuth access tokens (generated by GCM) stored in cache with a long timeout. The usability is pretty good -- once per day I do the OAuth device flow [1] entering a code from the Raspberry Pi into a device with a web browser [2].

GCM was indeed awkward to install on Linux arm64. I wrote git-credential-oauth [3][4] in Go to be easier for Linux distros to package.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8628.html
Show 8 quoted lines
> The OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant is designed for Internet-
> connected devices that either lack a browser to perform a user-agent-
> based authorization or are input constrained to the extent that
> requiring the user to input text in order to authenticate during the
> authorization flow is impractical.  It enables OAuth clients on such
> devices (like smart TVs, media consoles, digital picture frames, and
> printers) to obtain user authorization to access protected resources
> by using a user agent on a separate device.

[2] https://github.com/login/device [3] https://github.com/hickford/git-credential-oauth [4] recent thread on git-credential-oauth https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAGJzqs=+fCQzkDX53H8Mz-DjXicVVgRmmzPjkatSiOpYO7wGGA@mail.gmail.com/T/#u [5] device flow support for git-credential-oauth https://github.com/hickford/git-credential-oauth/pull/9

Previous: brian m. carlsonNext: Matthew John Cheetham
Message 7 of 13 in “The enduring popularity of git-credential-store”
  1. M HickfordNov 8, 2022
  2. Michal SuchánekNov 8, 2022
  3. Jeff KingNov 8, 2022
  4. Taylor BlauNov 8, 2022
  5. M HickfordFeb 11, 2023
  6. brian m. carlsonNov 8, 2022
  7. M HickfordNov 12, 2022
  8. Matthew John CheethamNov 17, 2022
  9. Jeff KingNov 17, 2022
  10. Lessley DenningtonNov 17, 2022
  11. Jeff KingNov 17, 2022
  12. M HickfordMay 29, 2023
  13. M HickfordMay 28, 2023

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

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