Analysis of Implementations to Secure Git for Use as an Encrypted Distributed Version Control System

This paper analyzes two existing methods for securing Git repositories, Git-encrypt and Git-crypt, by comparing their performance relative to the default Git implementation. Securing a Git repository is necessary when the repository contains sensitive or restricted data. This allows the repository to be stored on any third-party cloud provider with assurance that even if the repository data is leaked, it will remain secure. The analysis of current Git encryption methods is done through a series of tests that examines the performance trade-offs made for added security. This performance is analyzed in terms of size, time, and functionality using three different Git repositories of varying size. The three experiments include initializing and populating a repository, compressing a repository through garbage collection, and modifying then committing files to the repository. The results show that Git maintains functionality with each of these two encryption implementations at the cost of time and repository size. The time increase is found to be a factor ranging from 14 to 38 times the original time. The size increase over multiple commits of edited files is found to increase linearly proportional to the working set of files.