Submitting this re: the recent discussion about PGP alternatives. It seems right in line with the types of tools that were being suggested for replacing specific use cases of PGP. Written by Tony Arcieri, who is well-regarded in the cryptography community.
When they said tar-like, I imagined they meant individual files could be extracted from an archive, but it seems not.
"However, it also provides seekability, allowing individual files within the archive to be decrypted, in addition to seeking within those files"; I don't it's implemented yet, but the protocol seems to have that capability.
NOTE: sear is presently vaporware, so this won't do a whole lot yet.
Ha, interesting that the project describes themselves that way!
What is the benefit of this over ZIP with extensions? That the headers are encrypted rather than falsified?