sops VS git-crypt

Mozilla SOPS (Secrets OPerationS) is an open-source command-line tool for managing and storing secrets. It uses secure encryption methods to encrypt secrets at rest and decrypt them at runtime. SOPS supports a variety of key management systems, including AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, and PGP. It's particularly useful in a DevOps context where sensitive data like API keys, passwords, or certificates need to be securely managed and seamlessly integrated into application workflows.

Encrypted secrets thanks to SOPS and Age

We do the exact same thing to keep track of some credentials we use sops[1] and AWS KMS to separate credentials by sensitivity, then use the git differ to view the diffs between the encrypted secrets

Definitely not best practice security-wise, but it works well

[1] https://github.com/getsops/sops

For anyone new to SOPS like I was - https://github.com/getsops/sops

I've found this is largely solved by strictly separating plain config and secrets, and then having secrets pull from GCP secret manager / vault / whatever.

You can then commit all the config (including the secret identifiers) and it all just works so long as you're authenticated with your secret storage system.

We do this for the live configuration as well in line with Gitops and find it to work well.

If you don't want to use a cloud secret manager you can also use something like https://github.com/getsops/sops to commit the encrypted secrets safely

Basically, the simpler the better --just encrypt your secrets and check them in to version control.

We use SOPS[0] for this, and have found it to be pretty nice.

[0]: https://github.com/getsops/sops

The answer is that secrets shouldn't be stored in the git repo at all, but somewhere safe like a password manager or Mozilla's SOPS which people seem to love.

Unfortunately, the SOPS project is in some sort of a limbo state and there has been quite a long period with limited maintenance and unclear position from Mozilla. Despite the project being accepted into the CNCF, it's still unclear what will happen with it going forward.

It looks like the software you're intending to use is oriented towards interacting with desktop Linux's keyring. While you can probably get this to work, I would recommend using something like sops as it's a more standardized way of storing secrets in configuration.

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.