alt Hacker NewsIn a git repo based on SHA-1 hashes, it would be good enough that the meaning of a commit signature is that the content of the commit is attested, not the parents.
Parent commits can have their own signatures, and it's true that there is an attack possible there where the same parent hash could point to two different commits, that have valid signatures of some kind (possibly from the same sneaky developer who is a bona fide project member).
Be that as it may, it's perfectly okay for the signature on a banana to validate only the banana, and not the gorilla that is holding it, or the vine the gorilla is swinging on, and the whole jungle.
It would be worth it to have better quality commit signing for SHA-1-based repos.
> it would be good enough that the meaning of a commit signature is that the content of the commit is attested, not the parents.
This is a significant degradation of the implicit guarantees given by a cryptographic signature, to the point that basically all personal use cases I have for signed commits would be invalidated.
Keep in mind that git does not have diffs as first-class objects. Every commit is just a snapshot of some state of the working directory. That means that without attesting to the integrity of the parents of a commit, the only thing a commit X signed by a person A says is "at some point on A's computer, the state of the repo looked like X".
Almost all the relevant questions I would want to ask are not answered by this. E.g. there is a malicious function F that is present in X. Did A write it? Don't know. Did someone else write it? Can't know for certain. Who introduced a certain feature? Don't know. Did A sign off on a new bugfix? Don't know.
All you know is that at some point the codebase looked like X on A's computer. A might not have made any relevant changes at all!
You can only back out a diff and therefore actually attribute a change to someone (either explicitly through `git blame` or informally by looking at git logs) if you have attestation of the parents.
The Merkle tree structure of git repos is interwoven through basically ever useful thing git does. Without cryptographic signatures implicitly carrying a promise of validity for that structure, this would make commit signing useless (depending on just how broken SHA-1 is) for the needs of any org I've ever worked at.