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Comment by CiPHPerCoder | Hacker News Reader

It's been around since 2019, and has been discussed heavily on Hacker News.

You're trying to tell us that software from 2019 isn't new? The majority of the software that I use on a daily basis is minimum a decade old, and I don't think I'm alone.

Yeah, and it is supposedly a software related to cryptography. Has it been audited at least? They are promoting it so much, but GnuPG has been around for a while now and loads of people have used it. What about Age? I feel more comfortable with GnuPG.

What is your bar for "audited"?

I've reviewed both the design and implementation for age in the past and only found nitpicky things to improve (mostly related to HKDF).

I can take a fresh look and make a pretty PDF on paragonie.com if you care so much.

I am sure audits could help Age either way. :) I am just saying that it is still fresh as opposed to GnuPG. This is what people typically call "battle-tested", when the software has been used by a zillion of people for some time. Of course I cannot speak about Age much, this is the first time I heard about it.

GnuPG had been battle tested for almost two decades before Efail was discovered and disclosed.

Yeah, but does this help Age?

Only to the extent that it shows you can't simply compare the vintage of two systems and declare the older one safer by dint of battle-testing.

I am not saying it is safer because it is older, but it sure has been under more scrutiny than Age. That said, Age might be safer regardless.

Can you describe the upside of this “more scrutiny”, since per the above it doesn’t seem to have made the codebase safer?

It isn't brand new, no.

So, it's brand new. Got it.

Hell, I have shirts older than the language it's written in.

In 20 years, I might not even be able to find a working compiler to build it, after the shiny-object crowd moves on to something else.

You know what I'll still be able to decrypt? An ASCII-armored, GPG encrypted, TAR archive.

Personally, I am not interested in the latest evolutionary improvements on file formats. Evolution produces a lot of interesting things; most of them are dead ends. What I want is the cockroach of file formats. The coelacanth.

You will be able to decrypt a file produced by age. All the cryptography there is standard, you'll have a compatible library in whatever language you'll use in 20 years, if you think the first party Go and Rust implementations won't survive.

Using common libraries, I can create a python program to decrypt a file produced by age in a few hours, I think.

> So, it's brand new. Got it.

No. Brand new means completely new. Something that's going on 3 years old isn't brand new anymore.

A more appropriately term is relatively new. Civilization is relatively new compared to the age of the universe. Age is relatively new compared to modern computers.

But neither civilization nor age are brand new.

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