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git-remote-grave

Adds a protocol to git for pushing and fetching encrypted repositories.

Example with a local file:

$ git remote add backup grave::/mnt/external-disk/backup
$ git push --all backup
git fast-import...
git repack -a -d -f...
git gc...
Packing and compressing...
Encrypting...
Pushing...
To grave::/mtn/external-disk/backup
 * [new branch]      master -> master
$ git fetch backup

Example with HTTP:

$ git clone grave::https://example.com/username/private-repo
Cloning into 'private-repo'...
Checking connectivity... done.

How do you make something like this?

I did a write-up here.

Using a key

The encryption key is produced by taking the SHA256 hash of a keysource. The keysource can be of any length; leading and trailing whitespace is stripped so that trailing newlines are not an issue.

If a key has not been set for the repository, then git-remote-grave will interactively determine the key. In all cases, the keysource will be ultimately copied to .git/grave/remotename/key with 600 permissions.

Three options are provided:

  1. Enter the keysource by typing a string. The characters will not be echoed, like a password.
  2. Specify an existing file as the keysource.
  3. Randomly generate a new key. Most secure. Only when pushing.

You can also set the environment variable GRAVE_KEYFILE to a file to use as the keysource. This may be useful in scripts.

Encryption

The package golang.org/x/crypto/nacl/secretbox, which is a port of DJB's NaCl, is used to encrypt and authenticate repositories. The nonce is randomly generated every time the repository is encrypted, so that two identical repositories encrypt to two completely different blobs of data. However, git-remote-grave knows if the unencrypted repository actually changed, and will skip a push or fetch if it's unecessary.

Packing and compression

After creating an encrypted repository for the first time, git repack -a -d -f and git gc are run. All the times after that, just git repack and git gc are run.

The repository is then packed with tar and compressed.

A tar archive of an empty git repository is used as the dictionary in the compression, improving the ratio. The algorithm used is golang's DEFLATE library on maximum compression level.

The combination of these techniques typically reduces the repository size by 78%.