[Monotone-devel] Supporting Encryption

[Peter Simons]

Hi,

I was wondering ... are there any plans of supporting
encrypted patch packets? Meaning, that the packages are
encrypted with someone's public key, so that only the
intended recipient(s) are able to read and apply the
patches?

I'm asking because I was thinking about using monotone to
implement off-site backups: A lot of friends of mine have
disk space en masse and fast DSL lines, so we talked about
copying each others important data to each others machines
as a backup copy, in case the whole house burns down or
something. The problem is, of course, that I want my data to
be _encrypted_ when I copy it to other people's hard disk --
friends or not. But creating a huge tar archive, encrypting
it, and rsync'ing it hence and forth wastes a lot of
bandwidth, because minor changes in the data cause the whole
file to change dramatically -- effectively disabling
incremental transfers.

So my idea was to set-up a mail account on these machines
and to tell monotone to mail all commits in copy to these
addresses, basically creating an off-site depot for my data.
And this is where the encryption would be useful! If
monotone would encrypt the packets before mailing them off
(or http'ing them off), this would solve all my problems.

What do you guys think about that?

Peter