Re: b4: Feature-Request: use salted hash for change-id instead of descriptive-name when using b4 prep

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Fri, Jun 02, 2023 at 10:00:11AM +0200, Johannes Zink wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> first of all: thanks for creating and maintaining b4, it makes my daily
> kernel developer's life so much easier...
> 
> Accidentally I came across a (documented [1]) behaviour of b4 prep that is a
> little dangerous for my workflow: the descriptive-name is incorperated in
> the MessageID and the changeID in plaintext.
> 
> While for most applications this is probably fine, sometimes I use branch
> names along the line of
> "upstream-feature-for-$super_secret_customer_project" (or some other stupid
> branch names [2] - which it at least a bit funny if you know german...),
> which poses a risk of actually leaking information I do not want to be
> leaked.

Hm.. this is a certainly not a workflow scenario I had considered.

> I would like to ask if there is a possibility to change this to using a
> salted hash instead (salt is probably required due to rainbow table attacks)
> for messageID and changeID. If this would break some workflows, it could
> possibly be added as an optional command line argument for b4 prep?

I will consider this request. For now, you can manually edit the cover letter
commit to change the JSON bit there that records the change-id.

E.g. right after you create a new b4-tracked branch using "b4 prep -n", you
can run "git commit --amend --allow-empty" and modify the change-id to be
whatever you like. Note, that you should only do this before you send out any
revisions.

-K