I infrequently have the need to encrypt some files; and traditionally I've used symmetric encryption with passphrases. But I feel like we're in a post-password world where any phrase that I as a human can remember is short enough that a computer could brute-force it. So I wanted to have something more secure which uses a secret key.. It's infrequent enough that keeping track of a GPG key would be a problem. But as a developer there's a secret key I use on a daily basis which I could leverage - my RSA SSH key. So I wrote a script to use my public/private key to encrypt and decrypt files. Posting this in case others would find it useful. >>>All the usual caveats/disclaimers about using crypto stuff written by a random non-crypt-expert developer etc...<<<
What a coincidence! Earlier today, I was wondering whether SSH could be used in place of GPG for encrypting messages; a common answer was that SSH was designed for a different purpose and that it wouldn't make sense to use it this way.
And here you've shown how it could be done. The script is interesting and educational to read through. Thanks for sharing.