pre-commit / pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks

Ban unarmored GPG keys

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#339 18 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Python
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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?

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  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 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

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