Re: The enduring popularity of git-credential-store

[M Hickford <mirth.hickford@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 8 Nov 2022 at 22:52, brian m. carlson
<sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:
>
> On 2022-11-08 at 10:50:33, M Hickford wrote:
> > Among StackOverflow users [1], git-credential-store appears several
> > times more popular than any other credential helper. Does this make
> > anyone else uneasy? The docs warn that git-credential-store "stores
> > your passwords unencrypted on disk" [2]. Are users sacrificing
> > security for convenience?
>
> I definitely think there are better approaches.  However, none of the
> credential managers for the three major platforms work without a
> desktop environment, so if someone's logging in over SSH, then there's
> no more secure option that's going to work for them.  Taylor did
> mention GCM, but I believe it has the same problem, and even if it
> didn't, it's written in C#, which isn't portable to many Unices and
> isn't viable on servers anyway due to dependencies.

On my headless Raspberry Pi, I use OAuth access tokens (generated by
GCM) stored in cache with a long timeout. The usability is pretty good
-- once per day I do the OAuth device flow [1] entering a code from
the Raspberry Pi into a device with a web browser [2].

GCM was indeed awkward to install on Linux arm64. I wrote
git-credential-oauth [3][4] in Go to be easier for Linux distros to
package.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8628.html

> The OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant is designed for Internet-
> connected devices that either lack a browser to perform a user-agent-
> based authorization or are input constrained to the extent that
> requiring the user to input text in order to authenticate during the
> authorization flow is impractical.  It enables OAuth clients on such
> devices (like smart TVs, media consoles, digital picture frames, and
> printers) to obtain user authorization to access protected resources
> by using a user agent on a separate device.

[2] https://github.com/login/device
[3] https://github.com/hickford/git-credential-oauth
[4] recent thread on git-credential-oauth
https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAGJzqs=+fCQzkDX53H8Mz-DjXicVVgRmmzPjkatSiOpYO7wGGA@mail.gmail.com/T/#u
[5] device flow support for git-credential-oauth
https://github.com/hickford/git-credential-oauth/pull/9