git-annex plaintext storage of embedded credentials on encrypted remotes

git-annex had a bug in the S3 and Glacier remotes where if embedcreds=yes was set, and the remote used encryption=pubkey or encryption=hybrid, the embedded AWS credentials were stored in the Git repository in (effectively) plaintext, not encrypted as they were supposed to be.

That means that anyone who gets a copy of the Git repository can extract the AWS credentials from it. Which would be bad.

A remote with this problem cannot be enabled using git annex enableremote. Old versions of git-annex will fail with a GPG error; the current version will fail with a pointer to this web page.

Remediation

If your repository has this problem, chose from one of these approaches to deal with it:

1. Change your AWS credentials, so the ones stored in the clear in git won't be used.

   After changing the credentials, make sure you have a fixed version of git-annex, and you can then re-embed the new creds into the repository, encrypted this time, by setting the AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID environment variables, and running git annex enableremote $remotename embedcreds=yes.

2. Fix the problem and then remove the history of the git-annex branch of the repository.

   Make sure you have a fixed version of git-annex, and force git-annex to rewrite the embedded creds, with encryption this time, by setting by setting the AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID environment variables, and running git annex enableremote $remotename embedcreds=yes.

   Then, to get rid of old versions of the git-annex branch that still contains the creds in cleartext, you can use git annex forget; note that it will remove other historical data too.

   Keep in mind that this will not necessarily delete data from clones you do not control.

3. If you're sure that you're the only one who has access to the repository, you could decide to leave it as-is. It's no more insecure than if you had used encryption=shared in the first place when setting it up.