pre-commit / pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks
Ban unarmored GPG keys
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Description
In #329 we added a ban for ASCII-armored GPG private keys. But as far as I can tell we don't have a method for detecting un-armored private keys, since they resemble unstructured binary data.
$ gpg --export-secret-keys > secrets
$ file -I secrets
secrets: application/octet-stream; charset=binary
However, that doesn't mean they can't be identified (evidently):
$ file secrets
secrets: PGP Secret Key - 4096b created on Sun Nov 17 19:37:04 2013 - RSA (Encrypt or Sign) e=65537 hashed AES with 128-bit key Salted&Iterated S2K SHA-11
It looks like the mime-type for PGP keys is defined here: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3156
This leads to a fork in the road for implementation:
We could make a subprocess call to file.
I don't like this for portability reasons. We don't know that file exists and behaves consistently everywhere pre-commit will be deployed.
We could use the magic library.
This works:
$ python3
Python 3.7.1 (default, Nov 6 2018, 18:45:35)
[Clang 10.0.0 (clang-1000.11.45.5)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import magic
>>> mime = magic.Magic()
>>> mime.from_file('secrets')
'PGP\\011Secret Key - 4096b created on Sun Nov 17 19:37:04 2013 - RSA (Encrypt or Sign) e=65537 hashed AES with 128-bit key Salted&Iterated S2K SHA-1'
But it adds a dependency on a non-standard library: python-magic.
We could try to emulate the mimetype matching ourselves.
Reinvents a wheel and the consequences of getting it wrong when users trust us to get it right could be bad.
What do you think?
Contributor guide
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First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reading issue #329 and the existing ASCII-armored GPG private-key ban. Compare the proposed file, python-magic, and self-implemented MIME matching approaches, then define a portable detection behavior and verify that unarmored private keys are rejected without incorrectly banning ordinary binary data.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- security
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100