transcrypt VS git-crypt

I was looking into secret storage in git recently and rather liked Transcrypt: https://github.com/elasticdog/transcrypt

On the actual system itself (you likely know this as you'd mentioned reading other posts, but) I have Neovim compiled on my phone (directly through Termux), notes pushed up to Github using transcrypt for backups and live-synced between several devices using syncthing (which is how I get notifications on my phone, using a Raspberry Pi and systemd services to implement against orgmode.nvim's notification API).

I use nvim-orgmode on my computer through Neovim, and keep that pushed up to Github (encrypted using transcrypt) but also have a Syncthing server setup on a Raspberry Pi.

Also if you want the notes to be encrypted and you push them to Github, try transcrypt. They won't be encrypted on disk, but will be when you push them.

Start writing all of your work down. I personally put almost every line of code I ever write into github. I have a "misc" project for random one-off things, but I always commit it to a repo. I started doing this in 2013/2014 and its been incredibly valuable to go back and refer to old work (its also fun to see how far you've come). This gets interesting when you start needing to write down information that shouldn't be public (e.g. api keys). You're into crypto, so you can probably see the fun in this. I've use a program called transcrypt to store encrypted files in my git repos. Be careful with transcrypt though, if you make a mistake you can accidentally publish secrets in plain text, and it does open you up to brute force attacks.

https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

And occasionally to encrypt files, or receive encrypted files.

These are practical things which are non-theoretical.

> Using multiple keys don't offer added security or secrecy.

Depends on how careful you are or want to be, with your private key. My house key isn't the same as my car key isn't the same as my bike key.

> This is nothing like data harvesting

Alright fair, bad example. What I was grumbling about was more the lack of any clear communication that you've been auto-opted-in to a feature on protonmail, with no user interface signal indicating so, leading to confusion for a couple months like in TFA. I definitely wasn't casting shade on the opengpg keyserver, nor protonmail. It's the "hey! I didn't check a box for this, and it's not mentioned anywhere in the protonmail docs" hidden functionality which could do with some clarification.

I'm a forgetful creature. If I intentionally put my key on a keyserver, because I'm playing around and learning about PGP, will I make the connection between it and protonmail a few months down the line if I move my email account to them? Unlikely.

It's a nice automated feature. Protonmail-to-protonmail e2e encryption makes a lot of sense. I just think protonmail-to-non-protonmail e2e needs a tooltip in the UI, and the option to opt out, potentially with the ability to opt out for specific email addresses. I wouldn't at all assume it would be on by default even IF I've been actively using PGP in my email clients, because it's something you usually have to manually set up yourself, very explicitly. That, and 99.9% of emails are plaintext.

Anyhoo, one thing I forgot which kind of negates the "what if I have multiple encryption keys tied to my email" is the fact that the opengpg keyserver does tie 1 email address to 1 key so you can't publish multiple encryption keys, fair enough. Git-crypt and file encryption, I set my associated email address to use +tags eg [email protected], so as far as protonmail etc are concerned there's only one key per logical email address.

Apart from a few exceptions (like ansible for example, which supports native encryption), we moved away from encrypted secrets in git repos and use external things, depending on the platform (like parameter store / secrets manager for AWS or keyvault for Azure - both of these do track changes, btw), so I haven't looked for quite a while. Back in ye olden days we used https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt which worked quite nicely, but the key management is cumbersome and it's based on GPG, which in itself is a bit of a light redish flag these days.

How about encryption?

https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt has been solid for me

You might want to check out git-crypt. It allows you to encrypt and decrypt files in a git repo without needing an external account, and supports .env files. That said, trying your hand at making one as a personal project could be a fun and rewarding experience!

I hesitate to append this but one option I have seen thrown around and also debated is git-crypt [1] There are many caveats to doing this as any integrations that would need to read the file contents would also need to be able to decrypt the files so this may not be entirely useful and may add many levels of complexity and fragility.

[1] - https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

The most interesting approach I've seen for this is https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt

Here is the Makefile.

I use git-crypt to encrypt files in git repositories quite a lot and I find that it doesn't work on RHEL-based distros because of some missing or out-of-date library. I need to build a statically linked binary.

Store the Secrets in a repo using gitcrypt or another encryption tool.

Consider using git-crypt for transparent encryption instead.