On Sun, Feb 26, 2017 at 01:13:59AM +0000, Jason Cooper wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 10:10:01PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > I was thinking we would need mixed mode support for smoother
> > transition, but it now seems to me that the approach to stratify the
> > history into old and new is workable.
>
> As someone looking to deploy (and having previously deployed) git in
> unconventional roles, I'd like to add one caveat. The flag day in the
> history is great, but I'd like to be able to confirm the integrity of
> the old history.
>
> "Counter-hashing" the blobs is easy enough, but the trees, commits and
> tags would need to have, iiuc, some sort of cross-reference. As in my
> previous example, "git tag -v v3.16" also checks the counter hash to
> further verify the integrity of the history (yes, it *really* needs to
> check all of the old hashes, but I'd like to make sure I can do step one
> first).
>
> Would there be opposition to counter-hashing the old commits at the flag
> day?
I don't think a counter-hash needs to be embedded into the git objects
themselves. If the "modern" repo format stores everything primarily as
sha-256, say, it will probably need to maintain a (local) mapping table
of sha1/sha256 equivalence. That table can be generated at any time from
the object data (though I suspect we'll keep it up to date as objects
enter the repository).
At the flag day[1], you can make a signed tag with the "correct" mapping
in the tag body (so part of the actual GPG signed data, not referenced
by sha1). Then later you can compare that mapping to the object content
in the repo (or to the local copy of the mapping based on that data).
-Peff
[1] You don't even need to wait until the flag day. You can do it now.
This is conceptually similar to the git-evtag tool, though it just
signs the blob contents of the tag's current tree state. Signing the
whole mapping lets you verify the entirety of history, but of course
that mapping is quite big: 20 + 32 bytes per object for
sha1/sha-256, which is ~250MB for the kernel. So you'd probably not
want to do it more than once.