Documentation / technical / signature-format.txton commit Documentation/technical: describe signature formats (76f9d8b)
   1Git signature format
   2====================
   3
   4== Overview
   5
   6Git uses cryptographic signatures in various places, currently objects (tags,
   7commits, mergetags) and transactions (pushes). In every case, the command which
   8is about to create an object or transaction determines a payload from that,
   9calls gpg to obtain a detached signature for the payload (`gpg -bsa`) and
  10embeds the signature into the object or transaction.
  11
  12Signatures always begin with `-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----`
  13and end with `-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----`, unless gpg is told to
  14produce RFC1991 signatures which use `MESSAGE` instead of `SIGNATURE`.
  15
  16The signed payload and the way the signature is embedded depends
  17on the type of the object resp. transaction.