alt Hacker News> Git hashes are not supposed to be a security mechanism
Probably a naive question, but why not kill two birds with one stone if it can be done for a reasonable cost?
> Git hashes are not supposed to be a security mechanism
Probably a naive question, but why not kill two birds with one stone if it can be done for a reasonable cost?
Because you're not killling two birds; you're not killing the security bird with a better content hash.
A SHA-256 sum, though very good, only assures you with great confidence that you're looking at the same thing you looked at before, or that someone else is looking at elsewhere.
It is not a digital signature, and we don't want digital signatures to serve the role of content hashes.
Speaking of signatures, we have support for them in Git; you can use gpg to sign commits, and set it up to be done automatically.
Nobody is going to fake your commit such that the fake has the same SH-1 hash and your GPG signature.
The worry there is that the key holder (whether the legitimate one, or a malicious party who got a hold of the key) somehow does this: creates a new commit, signed with their key, which somehow has the same SH-1 as an existing signed commit. The git hash includes the GPG signature, so there is a significant layer of difficulty there which is likely harder than faking an unsigned SHA-256 commit.