Hacker News Reader

Comment by RyJones | Hacker News Reader

ok, great, when will I be able to scope tokens to acting on only one repo, or only one org, or in any meaningful way?

I'm sure this is a valid complaint about Github, but it has nothing to do with the article, which is a bit annoying since there's some cleverness in that article (checksumming tokens, for instance) that we could be talking about stealing, rather than turning this thread into a generic referendum on whether Github is good.

The article is about GitHub's authentication tokens. It seems relevant to bring up a complaint about their scopes.

And yet it's not, because this is an article about token formats, and not about entire authorization schemes.

a) I don't see what is particularly clever about their token algorithm.

b) Talking about fundamental flaws in their token implementation seems relevant in a discussion about their token implementation.

c) Public discussions about flaws are often the best way to educate others and make the company aware of them.

It’s valid because GitHub is using cycles on format when the functionality is more important.

I think these new formats are nice, but don’t care give how hard to use their token scheme is. Just some mention of other stuff coming would be nice.

The problem I have is I’m not even sure if GitHub recognizes this as a problem (I have to grant access to every repo I can access to every script) and it’s been broken for years. Would be nice to know what they’re working on.

This is what they are working on: https://github.blog/changelog/

It seems to me that its a PM centric process i.e. lots of end-user features rather than fixing the behind the scenes parts that are poorly designed and/or broken.

We tried to workaround the inadequate token support by using their Terraform module for automation. Only for it to delete our repos losing years of issues because of a bug where renaming = deleting (3 year old issue that has never been prioritised).

I definitely agree this is needed, but I have to imagine it's quite a complex change on GitHub's side. It probably entails changing a lot of their authentication architecture, in terms of what's stateless and stateful and what requires a trip to the DB to check (i.e., it's hard to encode a list of which resources you should have access to in a single token). I'm sure they're aware this is a problem though. Maybe this recent change sets the groundwork for fixing it.

That the only method I have to scope tokens is to break the TOS for GitHub - by creating single-use accounts - is super lame.

What TOS does it violate? They explicitly recommend creating machine users in certain areas of their help docs.

This one? ”you may not have more than one free Account”

https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

But there’s also later more detailed guidance:

”One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free Account (if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine).”

Presumably then it would be non-violating to have many paid accounts? Sure is pricey for smaller operations but depending on the value it brings to have this more granular scoping it surely might be worth it?

Doesn't remove their need to implement a more reasonable way of scoping tokens, though.

This means that if you create a work account that is separate from your personal account (because you don't use personal credentials on work machines and vice-versa) then you are technically in violation of the TOS...

Yet this is something I, and many others, do because we don't want to mix business with pleasure. In fact I absolutely refuse to do so because of security reasons.

Many Microsoft employees also have separate personal and work accounts. I would be surprised if that was a violation.

It is explicitly a technical violation of the TOS.

In practice this is mostly so github has a reason to misuses like bots which might not be caught by the anti-spam measure.

They do mind a bit but not too much, and you can get help from support having literally stated that you have multiple accounts. For instance if you're testing an extension or integration with github, and there are specific interactions between different users… you kinda need different users to test it. And mocking github may not be sufficient.

Yes. I'm talking specifically about the "separate personal and work accounts" case. It may very well be a TOS violation as the TOS is written. I'm saying I'd be surprised if they treated it as one.

I'm actually dealing with something like this right now and am curious what solutions people use for e2e testing of OAuth flows. I'm leaning toward creating a test account at each Identity Provider, but then I have to deal with things like 2FA. I guess it's not so bad if I just use a TOTP generator on the client, but if they want to send an email to verify my account, that's just annoying.

Aren’t the work accounts, paid accounts? The TOS only restricts having multiple free accounts.

No, the work accounts are not paid accounts. My work requires me to interact with Open Source projects and the like. We have our own hosted Gitlab instance for our internal projects.

The work account is strictly to communicate with/provide patches back to upstream projects.

I have multiple personal accounts on Github. One for each employer I have worked at in the past couple of years, and my personal account that is tied to my own identity and is used for my personal time projects/open source work that is not tied to $work.

Well the solution is simple, just make a new LLC for each GitHub account you need!

I'm definitely kidding, but unless there is more in there TOS (which I don't intend to read) I don't see why this wouldn't be a workable loophole

Whatever the letter of this restriction is, that's not its spirit. Our practice at my last company was per-client segregated accounts, and I have a mailbox full of discussions with Github support staff telling us that was OK.

This seems like a classic case of rules with high potential for selective enforcement which generally leads to unfair enforcement. It's fine as long as you don't somehow get on Github's bad side and if you do it's an instant reason to close your accounts.

Don't forget that creating new accounts costs money.

If you want to take advantage of Environments for example then you need to pay for the Enterprise license which means every account is another $21/month. That adds up for individual and startup use.

I am actually confused why we can't just have tokens assigned to organisations and not users.

GitHub for me is running out of excuses for why the fundamentals of their platform is so poor. And why compared to Gitlab they deliver improvements at such an anaemic pace. They act like a company with 15 employees let alone 1,500+.

Everything from Security, Actions, Containers, Packages, Terraform, JIRA Integration etc is either completely broken or has major outstanding issues that haven't been fixed for years.

Personally, we use GitLab for all the internal repos at our company. We originally migrated because GitLab CI was free and GitHub didn't even have a CI solution at the time. We still use GitHub for our public repos since that's "where the community is." GitHub actions is great, although IMO a bit too prescriptive (I'd rather write a script that can run anywhere rather than spend time building up the mental model of the abstractions that are unique to GHA). But nothing beats GitLab CI + container registry; we put a lot of work into our CI pipeline and now we've got incremental builds with a Docker image for every service tagged per commit. And since GitLab Container Registry supports manifest v2, we can take advantage of BuildKit layer caching (I think GitHub registry supports this now too, but haven't played with it).

That said, GitLab has its fair share of problems too. GitHub UI is way better, community/discussion features are better, and forking/public collaboration workflow is better.

I'm glad there are two big players in the space, though; GitLab really lit a fire under GitHub to finally get them to start pushing new features.

You can already do that today. Create a Github App and add it only to a single repo.

I'd be happy to have a repo read-only scope to start with, it seems a little nutty that in the year 2021 the only repo scope available is read-write https://docs.github.com/en/developers/apps/scopes-for-oauth-...

I completely agree. This change is interesting and all, but GitHub (Enterprise, in my case) tokens aren't granular enough. There's a lot more benefit to be had in fixing that issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com