getsops / getsops/sops

Feature: ability to turn off lastmodified and mac

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#1,712 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Go
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23.1k
Forks
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Avg merge
1d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

I believe my organization's use-case is quite common: using sops to encrypt secrets to store them in git.

This poses a scalability challenge: If two PRs edit the file, the latter one will have merge conflicts.

One way to mitigate this is to split up the files. We don't want to do this!

If we had the ability to turn off lastmodified and mac, PRs would only have merge conflicts if they modified the same keys.

I think these two fields are unnecessary for our use-case:

  • lastmodified can be determined in git history
  • modifications are code-reviewed, so detecting fraudulent modifications feels out of scope for this use-case. There is one threat model that sticks out here: a git user who doesn't have access to the encryption key is able to create a pull request that uses old encrypted values, and can also swap values between keys.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the handling of the lastmodified and mac fields and the existing configuration or command entry points for optional behavior. Define how users would disable each field, then verify that encrypted files omit them while still working for the stated Git merge-conflict use case and preserving the documented threat-model expectations.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
git, go
Domain
security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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