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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't git crypt solve this? You can have encrypted blobs in a repo that will be auto decrypted if you have a working key.

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That depends on you distributing working keys for any components you want to restrict access to, and managing those keys for all users, revoking them when access permissions change, etc. It's a lot more complex, more work, and harder to manage than centralized RBAC or similar.

People don't use git crypt nearly enough unfortunately.

Agreed. I use and love git crypt, but it doesn't get enough use. I think because it's easy to screw up gpg keys. Most of my uses (for one to three devs) have become symmetric keys shared out-of-band instead of using gpg keys because we've had lots of onboarding pain even from people who are quite competent. There are just a lot of sharp edges in gpg that you don't know when you don't know.

i really want to use a similar tool that uses age instead of gpg, but the ones i've tried were all not as nice to use, or very undermaintained. but idk i havent checked in a while

Not really, precisely because it’s decentralized. You can’t audit whether a user accessed one of the hidden files, or really even who can access it once you accept the reality of the risk that some team will put a key on S3 or a shared drive or whatever.

It’s fine for things that you want devs to be able to see without the Git host being able to see them, it’s less good at RBAC because there’s no real “identity” component at read-time.

You can use Mozilla SOPS instead with IAM roles and KMS instead of gpg. They also shifted to AGE over gpg.

What a soup of acronyms

It’s the same problem. You don’t have an audit trail. That’s needed in a lot of situations for compliance reasons

Why is an audit trail interesting? I would expect its basically useless as anything that can be accessed can be copied. So it doesn't even give info of user x viewed y at some time.

Git submodules + SSH keys is another (somewhat "homebrew") solution to this.

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